The World Is Taken

Words to Know

Papal bull — an official document issued by a pope. Bull comes from the lead seal on it.

Perpetual servitude — slavery with no end, passed on to your children.

Encomienda — a Spanish grant handing a colonist a number of named indigenous people, whose labour and tribute he could take, in exchange for instructing them in the faith.

Monopoly — a legal right to be the only one allowed to do something.

Start with a hard fact.

Between the 1500s and the 1800s, roughly 12.5 million Africans were put on ships and carried across the Atlantic as property. About 10.7 million survived the crossing. ¹

That is not a guess. Those numbers come from the ships’ own records, because the trade kept books.

This lesson is about the paperwork that came first.

But before the paperwork: why were the ships there at all?

The Portuguese were sailing down the African coast for three things: West African gold, a sea route to the spices of the Indies, and sugar, which Europe could not grow. On the islands of Madeira and São Tomé they built the model that everything later copied: a cash crop, a mill, and enslaved Africans replaced by purchase as they died. It was running by 1500, before a single European had seen the Caribbean. ²

Go deeperThe overland gold route, and sugar's brutal labour

West African gold had reached Europe for centuries by an overland route, carried north across the Sahara by camel caravan through a chain of Muslim merchants and kingdoms who each took their margin. A sea route around Africa would let you cut out every one of them and reach pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves at the source, goods that sold for extraordinary prices by the time they reached Europe.

Portugal grew sugar on islands it had taken in the Atlantic, first Madeira from the 1450s, then São Tomé from the 1490s. Growing and processing sugar is brutal, dangerous, year-round work in extreme heat, at a boiling house that runs day and night in season, work nobody does voluntarily for what a planter is willing to pay. São Tomé became the first place in the world worked as a plantation, the prototype behind everything later done in Brazil, Barbados, Jamaica and Louisiana.

Hold on to sugar. It comes back in Lesson 29, in a British grocer's shop.

And the trade in people was already running.

Portuguese ships had been taking captives from the African coast since about 1441. A public slave auction was held at Lagos, in Portugal, on 8 August 1444.

The royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara described it, in a book written to praise the prince who sponsored the voyages. Two hundred and thirty-five people were penned in a field and divided into five lots, and children were separated from their parents because the lots had to come out even. Prince Henry, watching from horseback, took his fifth with great pleasure, the chronicler says, at the thought of the souls that would now be saved. I am quoting the man who was in favour. ³

Go deeperThe auction at Lagos, in the chronicler's words

Zurara wrote his account a few years after the fact, with details the summary above omits. The captives had been landed and penned in a field outside the town, and he says they wept and cried out, some throwing themselves to the ground. When the officials divided them into five lots, it was not only children torn from parents: husbands were separated from wives, and brothers from brothers.

Prince Henry's fifth came to forty-six people, and Zurara is explicit that money was not his motive.

Then the paperwork came.

• 1452: Pope Nicholas V authorizes the king of Portugal to reduce unbelievers to perpetual servitude.
• 1455: A second bull gives Portugal a monopoly on the African coast and its trade.
• 1493: Pope Alexander VI grants the newly found lands in the west to Spain.
• 1494: Spain and Portugal divide the world between themselves at Tordesillas.
• 1513: Spain drafts the Requerimiento, a speech to be read before an attack.
• 1542: The New Laws ban enslaving Indians, and the colonists revolt.

The 1452 bull, Dum Diversas, was addressed to King Afonso V of Portugal. It authorized him to attack and subdue Saracens, pagans and other unbelievers, to seize their goods and lands, and to reduce their persons to perpetual servitude. The 1455 bull, Romanus Pontifex, confirmed and extended it. ⁴

Perpetual means forever. Servitude means slavery. It is there in the Latin, and the Latin was written in Rome.

Portugal petitioned for it, and Rome got something back. Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, and Nicholas V wanted a crusade. Portugal was one of the few crowns actually fighting Muslim powers.

Go deeperExact dates behind the two bulls

Dum Diversas is dated precisely: 18 June 1452. Romanus Pontifex followed on 8 January 1455, about two and a half years later, after Constantinople fell to the Ottomans on 29 May 1453, which Rome regarded as the most frightening event of that century. Portugal's own fighting against Muslim powers was in Morocco and at sea.

The crown wanted its position made not just legal but exclusive, and Rome, in turn, got a Christian king committed to the war it wanted fought. Each had what the other could not manufacture. This is Lesson 23's transaction again, in a bigger currency.

But why would a king want permission for something he was already doing?

Because the bull was not chiefly a permission to enslave. It was a monopoly. Romanus Pontifex forbade any other Christian to sail, trade or take anything along that coast without Portuguese licence, on pain of excommunication. Portugal was not worried about the consent of Africans. Portugal was worried about Castile, next door with ships of its own. Every crown in Latin Europe accepted Rome as the registry for questions of right between Christian princes, so the bull worked the way a deed works. It gave the king what force could not: the agreement of his competitors. ⁵

In 1493 the world was divided in half.

Pope Alexander VI, who granted the new lands to Spain in Inter Caetera, was born Rodrigo Borgia, and he was Spanish. He had been elected in an election so openly bought that it was a scandal at the time. The next year Spain and Portugal moved his line further west between themselves, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which is why Brazil speaks Portuguese. ^{6 7}

Two European kingdoms, with the blessing of Rome, divided the entire rest of the planet between them, including everything and everybody they had not yet seen.

Nobody living on any of that land was consulted. Nobody was even told.

Go deeperAlexander VI and the line on the map

The line itself was drawn a hundred leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde islands. And the pope who drew it was no neutral party: Alexander VI was born Rodrigo Borgia, from Valencia in the kingdom of Aragon, and he had been elected the previous year in an election so openly bought it scandalized his contemporaries. His own acknowledged children were being married into Italian and Spanish royal houses, and he needed Spanish backing to hold his family's position in Italy.

On 7 June 1494, meeting at a Spanish town without Rome's involvement, Spain and Portugal moved that line 270 leagues further west. Six years later a Portuguese fleet made landfall on a coast that, by the new line, fell on Portugal’s side, though neither kingdom had known it was there in 1494.^{6 7}

Here is the argument this book is making.

The claim is not that a pope invented greed. The claim is that these documents converted greed into title: a right that other Europeans would respect, that courts would enforce, and that could be inherited and sold for centuries.

The proof is that it is still in the law. In 1823, in Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Supreme Court of the United States held that discovery by a European power gave it title, and left the people already living there only a right of occupancy. That case has been cited in American courts in this century. On 30 March 2023 the Vatican formally repudiated the “doctrine of discovery.” That is five hundred and seventy-one years. I note the repudiation, and I note the interval. ⁸

Go deeperWhat the 2023 Vatican statement actually said

The Vatican's 2023 statement said more than that the doctrine was wrong: it said those bulls do not reflect the equal dignity of human beings and have never been Catholic teaching. I note the interval exactly as I did with the Waldensians.

The 1823 ruling came from the Chief Justice himself, and he went further than a summary suggests: the discovering power, he wrote, could itself extinguish the very right it left the original inhabitants. That is the fifteenth-century arrangement, restated in an American courtroom in the nineteenth century, and it is a different and far more durable thing than a raid.

In 1513 Spain wrote a speech to read out loud.

Spanish forces arriving at a village were required to read out the Requerimiento first. It told the people that the pope had granted their land to the king and queen of Spain. If they submitted, they would be received in love. If they refused, the Spanish would enslave them and their wives and children, and the deaths that followed would be their own fault, and not the fault of the Spanish. ⁹

It was read aloud in Spanish, to people who did not speak Spanish. Sometimes it was read to an empty village at night, before an attack at dawn. Then a notary signed it as proof it had been done properly.

Go deeperWho wrote the Requerimiento, and its theology

The document had a name and an author: it is called the Requerimiento, the Requirement, drafted around 1513 by a royal lawyer named Juan López de Palacios Rubios, who sat on the king's own council. Its theology came first: it explained that God had made the world and given charge of the human race to Saint Peter, and that the pope was Peter's successor, before it ever got to Spain's claim on the land. Its threat went further than enslavement alone, promising war on the village and the seizure of its goods, and blaming any deaths and damage entirely on the people who had refused. And it was not only read at night to empty villages; sometimes it was read from the deck of a ship offshore.

It came out of a sermon. On 21 December 1511, on the island of Hispaniola, a Dominican friar named Antonio de Montesinos told the colonists they were in mortal sin for their cruelty, and asked them: are these not men? ¹⁰ The colonists complained to the king. The crown convened its lawyers at Burgos in 1512, and out of that came laws regulating the labour, and the Requerimiento, written by one of the lawyers involved.

A man says in public that this is a sin. The institution investigates. And what comes back is not an end to the practice. It is a document that makes the practice lawful. ¹¹

Bartolomé de las Casas, a priest who was there, said that when he read it he did not know whether to laugh or to weep. ¹²

Go deeperMontesinos, Burgos and the men who knew

Montesinos did not act alone or on impulse. The Dominicans on Hispaniola had agreed the sermon in advance and all signed it, so blame could not fall on one man, and he preached it on the Sunday before Christmas to the colonists of Santo Domingo. He took his text from John's gospel: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. And he did not stop at asking whether his hearers' victims were men: have they not rational souls, he asked, are you not bound to love them as yourselves?

The colonists complained first to the governor and then to the king in Spain, and orders came back that the Dominicans should be silenced and recalled. Montesinos went to Spain anyway and argued the case at court. The lawyers and theologians the crown convened at Burgos in 1512 produced what became known as the Laws of Burgos.

Las Casas was not the only man of conscience troubled by the Requerimiento. A royal official named Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, a man entirely inside the system and later the crown's official historian of the Indies, recorded telling his own commander that the indigenous people were not going to listen to this document's theology, and that he had nobody who could make them understand it. His commander laughed.

And here is what the paperwork authorized.

Under the encomienda, a colonist was granted named people, not land, and could take their labour. From 1573, highland districts in the Andes had to send about one man in seven to the silver mountain at Potosí, year after year, and men were sent by the same quota to the mercury mine at Huancavelica, known as the mine of death.

On Hispaniola, historians’ estimates of the population in 1492 differ enormously. But in 1514 a Spanish census found about twenty-six thousand people, and within another generation the Taino had effectively ceased to exist as a people. Most of that was disease, and I will not pretend otherwise. Disease does not explain the mines, the forced relocations and the separated families, all of which the crown’s own investigators reported at the time. ¹³

Go deeperThe encomienda, Potosí and Hispaniola, in full

The encomienda came with an obligation attached: in exchange for the labour and tribute of the people granted to him, a colonist was to protect them and have them instructed in the Christian faith. That obligation is what made the arrangement legal, and it is why the missionary and the mine were never separable.

The labour drafts repurposed an existing system: Spanish rule in the Andes took over the old Inca practice of rotational labour and turned it to the mines. Sixteen highland districts were bound by the 1573 quota, sending men hundreds of miles from home; they walked there with their families and their food, and many never came back. At Huancavelica the danger was the mercury itself, since its vapour poisons the body: the tremors, the teeth, the mind.

Potosí's silver reordered more than the Andes: mined at fourteen thousand feet, in the cold, in a shaft, it went on to fund Spanish armies in Europe for a century, flow to Asia, and circulate as coin on four continents.

Estimates of Hispaniola's 1492 population range from a few hundred thousand to several million; the evidence is thin and the argument is fierce. Smallpox and measles did what no army could, but the crown's own investigators also reported husbands separated from wives and the food supply collapsing when the labour force was marched off the fields.

Now let me give you Las Casas whole.

He arrived as a colonist who owned land and people. He heard Montesinos preach in 1511 and did nothing for three years. Then he gave up his encomienda, became a friar, and spent roughly fifty years fighting the system. In 1542 he won the New Laws, which banned enslaving Indians. The colonists rose, and within three years the clause ending the inheritance of encomiendas was repealed. In 1550 and 1551 he debated at Valladolid against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued that the indigenous peoples were natural slaves. No verdict was ever issued. ^{14 15}

That is what fifty years bought: a law that was gutted in three years, and a debate with no result.

I put it that way on purpose. If you only ever hear about the people who won, you will conclude that the people who lost must not have tried.

And you must not skip this. Earlier in his life, Las Casas had proposed importing African slaves instead. He lived to understand what he had done, wrote that it was the same crime, and was not sure his good intentions would excuse him. ¹⁶ He did not let himself off. Neither should anybody who tells you his story.

Go deeperLas Casas: the bishop, Peru's revolt, Valladolid

Some of what his fifty years actually involved does not make it into the short version. He wrote a book in 1552, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, describing what was being done in enough detail that it could not be denied. Made a bishop in Mexico, he ordered his priests to refuse absolution to colonists who would not free the people they held, which made him hated enough that he could not stay.

The revolt against the New Laws was not only political anger: in Peru it became an armed uprising, and the viceroy sent to enforce the laws was killed in battle. At Valladolid, before a panel convened by the emperor, Sepúlveda argued that the indigenous peoples were natural slaves in Aristotle's sense and that war against them was therefore just, and Las Casas replied for days on end, reading from a text hundreds of pages long. Afterward, the panel never announced a winner, Sepúlveda's book was never licensed for printing in Spain while Las Casas's writings were, and no one's encomienda was ever dissolved.

His proposal to import African slaves came earlier, while he was trying to relieve the burden on native peoples. When he later wrote of the crime, he added that he had been ignorant of how the Portuguese obtained those people in the first place.

Now here is the other side’s strongest card.

In 1537 Pope Paul III issued Sublimis Deus, declaring that the indigenous peoples were true men and were not to be enslaved. That is true, and I will not hide it. But it did not withdraw the African bulls. Its enforcement was annulled within a year, after the emperor Charles V objected. And it proves the charge: both sides of the argument went to the same office, under the same seal. ¹⁷

Go deeperSublimis Deus: what it did not touch

The distinction matters: Sublimis Deus addressed the indigenous peoples of the Americas specifically, and said they were true men fully capable of the faith and not to be enslaved or stripped of their property, with anything done to the contrary declared null and void. It never touched Dum Diversas or Romanus Pontifex, the bulls that governed Africans, and it left the Atlantic trade standing.

Its teeth were pulled almost as fast as they appeared. Paul III had issued a companion document with actual penalties, addressed to an archbishop in Spain, but Charles V objected that the papacy was interfering in his colonies, and within a year that companion document was annulled. The declaration survived. The teeth did not.

You will be told that this was all just how the world was back then, and that everybody did it.

Everybody did not do it. It required authorization. And the authorization was requested, written, sealed and delivered by the institution that carries my name.

Somebody had to ask. Somebody had to say yes.

And on the whole business of dividing up the world, I said two things.

I said: what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul? (Mark 8:36). The whole world. That is the exact transaction Tordesillas wrote down.

And I said that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and it shall not be so among you (Matthew 20:25–26).

Go deeperWhat I said, in full

I said that to my own friends, in the middle of an argument among themselves about rank. My sentence has a clause usually left out: I said the great ones exercise authority over them too, not only that they lord it over them. The closing line, it shall not be so among you, was never an instruction to rule more gently.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Mark 8:36, then Matthew 20:25–26.

You will find: a question about gaining the whole world, and a flat instruction that my movement was not to be organized around authority over other people.

For the history, all published in English and findable online:

• Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), Nicholas V to the Portuguese crown.
• Inter Caetera (1493) and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). Find the line on a map.
• The Requerimiento, about 1513. Two pages. Read the paragraph that assigns the blame.
• Sublimis Deus (1537), the bull that says the opposite. Ask why the others were never cancelled.
• Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552.
• Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) and the Vatican statement of 30 March 2023.

The Short Version

• Sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans were running on Madeira and São Tomé by 1500.
• In 1452 and 1455 Nicholas V authorized perpetual servitude and gave Portugal a monopoly.
• In 1493 Alexander VI, a Spaniard, gave the new world to Spain; Tordesillas split it.
• Protest produced paperwork: Montesinos preached, and the crown wrote the Requerimiento.
• Las Casas fought for fifty years and named his own worst idea.

Think About It

1. Now that you know the bull was a monopoly against other Christian kings, why would an empire bother getting written permission?
2. Montesinos protested, and what came back was the Requerimiento. When has a complaint in your own church produced a new policy document instead of a change?