Images of Pope Alexander VI circa 1485 and 1495. Hulton Archive/Getty Images/Getty Images
Before Rodrigo Borgia donned the papal tiara in 1492 and became Pope Alexander VI, he had multiple lovers and fathered at least eight children. He favored debauched parties with dancing prostitutes and used the papacy to enrich his Spanish family.
Upon his death, probably by poisoning, subsequent popes closed the Vatican apartments where Pope Alexander and his family had lived, as a prophylactic against the ghosts of his orgiastic reign.
And this is where many biographical entries end, prioritizing titillation over the substance of his government, which still haunts the world despite the efforts of the Vatican’s ghostbusters.
Abridged accounts of his life tend to exclude the jovial pope’s central role in European robbery of the Americas during the Age of Discovery, a massive dispossession of indigenous peoples that remains central to Canadian sovereignty.
Today, the international legal principle called the Doctrine of Discovery holds that the Christian nations of Europe legally acquired large tracts of indigenous land by touching land during the Age of Discovery and raising flags, or planting crosses or digging some earth. The doctrine, formulated in official Vatican decrees known as papal bulls and developed over the centuries by philosophers, scholars and an influential US Supreme Court justice, has been used to explain how the Crown continues to have an underlying interest in all lands of Canada. .
As Pope Francis prepares for his arrival in Canada next week, he faces growing pressure from the Assembly of First Nations and others to revoke the Doctrine of Discovery. This task is far beyond the powers of the Vatican, but the doctrine’s strange history could be said to serve as a warning. against underestimating the Pope’s influence.
“The history of the doctrine is the history of how you can get other people’s land by magic,” said Harry LaForme, who was Canada’s first indigenous appellate judge before his retirement in 2018. “Just sprinkle those papal bulls and you’re done.”
Harry LaForme in October 2018. Mark Blinch/The Globe and Mail
The world of the 15th century, according to Pope Alexander VI
Rodrigo Borja became Alexander VI the same year that Christopher Columbus found himself in the Bahamas and returned to Spain with parrots, gold, indigenous prisoners and syphilis. The discovery, as it was then called, raised the prospect of untold wealth, but also of war with Portugal, which had developed its own plundering ambitions.
Previous popes had granted Portugal the exclusive right to trade and enslave the people of West Africa. The Spanish Crown wanted assurances from the Vatican that it would not grant the Portuguese the New World as well.
Spain needn’t have worried. Pope Alexander VI was even a Spaniard.
Like a father dividing the cake between petulant children, he issued Alexander VI Among other thingsa series of papal bulls that drew a vertical line down the middle of the Atlantic, granting Portugal and Spain a hemisphere, or half a pie, each.
Under these papal bulls of donation, all non-Christian lands discovered west of the line went to Spain. Portugal gained non-Christian lands east of the line. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 would clarify the limits. In practical terms, Spain got the Americas and Portugal got Africa, plus the eastern bulge of South America, now known as Brazil.
The blue vertical line to the left of this 1502 map marks the limit agreed upon in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494.Biblioteca Estense Universitaria
The bulls claimed that Portugal and Spain were entitled to “free power, authority and jurisdiction of every kind” over all non-Christian lands, the land of the infidels, discovered in their respective hemispheres. Although the stated intent of the bulls was the mass Catholic conversion of indigenous peoples, conquest and domination were at their core, according to Steven Newcomb, a Lenape-Shawnee scholar and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Christian Doctrine of Discovery.
During a visit in 2013 to the General Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain, Mr. Newcomb convinced an archivist to show him one of the remaining versions of Among other thingswritten on sheepskin parchment with indelible octopus ink.
Among the rest of the Divine Bull, 1493.M. Seemuller/De Agostini via Getty Images
Under the dazzling portraits of Balboa, Cortez and other Spanish conquistadors, Mr. Newcomb analyzed the well-known Latin phrases, many of which he had memorized during 40 years of researching the doctrine. The archivist turned the document over. It was mostly blank, but one sentence gave Mr. Newcomb a jolt: “To Win and Conquer the Indies.” The ambitions of the Vatican were revealed.
“There was this pattern of dominance from the beginning,” he said. “The whole world order is still based on this claim to domination.”
Word spread throughout Europe. Soon, other countries wanted in on the rush for the spoils. In 1496, King Henry VII of England endorsed John Cabot’s transatlantic voyage “to find, discover, and investigate any islands, countries, regions, or provinces of heathens and infidels, in any part of the world, which before at that time they were unknown to all Christians. .”
In other words, Cabot could claim for the Crown any land that Spain had not reached first. “If you go back and look at any of these colonial charters, the so-called Crown charters, they’re mimicking the formula of papal documents from the Vatican,” Newcomb said.
The next few hundred years, very abbreviated
The Vatican would eventually clarify that the 1493 allocation of territory to Portugal and Spain only applied to lands known to exist at the time. All that was discovered afterwards were seeker-keepers. The ruling prompted France to send Jacques Cartier abroad.
Explorers used various rites when taking possession of unknown lands. Cartier’s crew erected a nine-meter cross on the Gaspé Peninsula.
Jacques Cartier with cross in Gaspe, Quebec, 1534. Drawing dated ca. 1880-1908.Henri Julien/Library and Archives Canada
Others piled up a few stones. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert took a stick and a piece of land to symbolize the possession of Newfoundland by the Crown.
“That’s the ridiculous and outlandish nature of this whole exercise,” Newcomb said. “They have been able to get away with it because only the European nations agreed among themselves to abide by these rules (honor among thieves) and the original nations and peoples have not had a chance to respond and point out the ridiculousness of it all. is.”
In the 1530s, the Protestant Reformation was in full swing. Rulers and scholars began to question the legitimacy of Europe’s claims abroad and its papal foundation. In 1533, Charles V of Spain convened a group of scholars to debate the issue. One of them, Francisco de Vitoria, concluded that any claim to America based on papal or monarchical authority was illegitimate.
“He asserted that indigenous peoples have rights and ownership over their lands,” said Douglas Lind, a professor at Virginia Tech whose research focuses on the philosophy of law. “The people may have universal power to try to convert people everywhere to Christianity, but that does not give the pope the right to designate lands on the basis of discovery.”
Vitoria admitted that the vacant lands belonged to no one (no man’s land) could be claimed by the first to discover them, but argued that the natives “certainly possessed [their lands] as true a domain, both public and private, as any Christian”.
He reasoned that Europeans in the Americas had a natural right to travel, trade, spread Christianity, and share in communal resources, such as water, but that these rights were below any property or dominion.
Later philosophers and legal theorists, such as John Locke and Emer de Vattel, would expand on the idea, warping it to suggest that legal possession of land must be accompanied by settlement and cultivation. Vattel, an influential 18th-century jurist, reasoned that Europeans had the right to take possession of America because the land was vast, with a largely nomadic indigenous population.
The 1502 map again, showing how the Western Hemisphere was seen by Europeans.Biblioteca Estense Universitaria
A 1707 map of the Western Hemisphere by Johann Baptist Homann. Nuremberg. Library of Congress
A 1777 map of the Western Hemisphere entitled “A New Map of the Whole Continent of America: Divided into North and South and the West Indies with a Descriptive Account of the European Possessions as Established by the Definitive Treaty of Peace, concluded in Paris in February”. 10 of 1763. ‘Library of Congress
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 imposed yet another interpretation. It assumed Crown ownership of much of North America and reserved a wide swath for indigenous groups that could only be acquired by treaty with the Crown. The document offers an irritating contradiction, simultaneously asserting the Crown’s sovereignty over North America and safeguarding indigenous land ownership.
By the 19th century, the United States had begun to grapple with the question of how it came to own such a vast territory in a series of rulings by the United States Supreme Court. In the landmark 1823 case Johnson v. M’Intosh, two people claimed ownership of the same piece of land. One said he acquired it from an Indian tribe and the other said he obtained it from the federal government.
It was up to the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall to decide who owned the underlying title to the land: the tribe or the feds.
Marshall laid out the principle of discovery. He wrote that papal bulls and agreements with neighboring European nations had given Spain authority to extinguish indigenous title in the Americas, that European discovery equaled European title, and that only the federal government, not the tribe, had the. ..