The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Preface: 1492 and its effects on Ireland (1)
Spain's right to America
In an article in the last issue of Church and State I said that the scale of killing of non-combatants practiced by the English in Ireland at various times in the 16th century and in the early 17th century was unparalleled anywhere else in Europe. However, some parallels can be found in what the Spanish were doing in America.
Back in 1992, I remember reading how a group of indigenous people living in Central America had celebrated the fifth centenary of being discovered: they hanged Columbus in effigy. From their point of view he was a bringer of ruin. I don’t think there were any such ceremonies in Ireland. The effects of Columbus’s voyage on Irish life were indirect, at a third or fourth remove, yet they were certainly powerful and for the Gaelic population they were extremely destructive.
With the discovery of the New World, the Old World entered its modern age. Granted, 1492 had a lot of preparation preceding it: there were people who had been in training. No one had trained harder than Columbus himself. Some writers (Gunther Hamann etc. (1)) argue that Columbus was not a modern man, meaning that he did not have the most up-to-date academic notions. But although he was no academic, he was a very well-read man. He had an enormous library stocked with everything he could find, print and manuscript, ancient and modern, that was connected with voyaging, geography and Asian peoples. He read his books actively, filling them with notes. Going from theory to practice, he was a most painstaking planner and a superb admiral. He was iron-willed, able to be incredibly hard on himself and hard on others too. No one could have been better equipped to invent colonialism.
Others who had been in training included the Popes. They were politicians on a number of levels, having an actual state power which they needed or wanted to make dominant in Italy. This meant that they came into military conflict with powerful European kings. At the same time they had to perform what was supposed to be their primary function, to preside over the religious unity of Europe (and potentially the world). But with the Muslim Turks on the advance, the Popes also had to try to think strategically for Europe, encouraging Christian counter-moves.
In the mid-15th century, when the Turks captured Constantinople, the picture was bleak. The Portuguese were the most active counter-movers, picking up territories in Africa and developing a new slave trade. Pope Nicholas V was glad to encourage them. In 1452 he issued a bull which gave authority to King Alfonso X of Portugal to attack, conquer and subject “Saracens, pagans and other infidel enemies of Christ”, seize their territories and goods, and reduce them to perpetual slavery. “The bull concedes a right of conquest without limits and without restrictions”, according to Paulino Delgado (2). It wasn’t clear that it didn’t apply to territories like the Canaries, which the kings of Castille considered exclusively theirs. However, the Pope showed no concern about any possible conflict with Spanish rights.
But in 1492 the tables were turned. Spain completed the expulsion of the Moors and at that very moment discovered a new continent. The Spanish promptly applied for official approval to Pope Alexander VI, otherwise known as Rodrigo de Borgia, father of the famous Cesare and Lucrezia. This Borgia Pope, along with his bitter enemy and successor Julius II, has won admiration from people not much noted for their religious enthusiasm – Nietzsche, for example. In Nietzsche’s opinion these Popes had ceased to be Christian. They were great Renaissance aristocrats and essentially pagans, focused on the secular world, pursuing huge political projects, affirming and enjoying life. This was pretty much what Luther thought of them, in fact, but where Luther condemned Nietzsche applauded. The Popes had left negative, mean, resentful, otherworldly, egalitarian Christianity behind, and it was Luther who revived the Christian spirit and added centuries to its life-span.
Whatever the truth of this opinion of the Renaissance Popes, they still insisted on being acknowledged as the greatest Christian authority. When the Spanish turned to Pope Alexander in that capacity, he responded in style. In 1493 he issued five bulls where he literally donated (“donamus, concedimus…”: Delgado p. 336) all the lands discovered in the west to the kings of Castille. One of these bulls specifically stated that the present right took precedence over any rights conceded previously; so then, the Portuguese were out! But this had to be reconsidered and a line had to be drawn in the map of the world to allow Portugal its fair share. In the following year this was formalised in the Treaty of Tordesillas, where the line of partition was drawn in a way that ultimately gave legal right to the Portuguese to seize north-western Brazil.
Delgado’s book is focused on the fascinating question: “Did the Pope transfer political sovereignty to the kings of Castille? Did he really divide, with that spectacular stroke of the pen, seas and continents? And if so, by virtue of what competence?” (p. 327). What right did the Pope have, or think he had, to do such a thing?
Some writers have argued that Alexander VI authorized the Spanish to take power in America as his feudal subjects, just as Adrian IV authorized the English kings to take power in Ireland. For a feudal grant, however, tribute should be payable (“one penny per house per year” in the case of Ireland), and Alexander’s bulls make no mention of tribute (Delgado p. 331). Also, unlike the Irish grant, the American grant is not made on the basis that the territories are islands and therefore for special reasons belong to the Popes (p. 338).
Delgado stresses that the language in the bulls is that of handing something over, conceding possession. What is the fundamental idea, the doctrine, behind this? It must either be theocracy (the idea that the Pope is lord of the world) or alternatively, the notion of the indirect temporal power of the Pope taken at its broadest. Delgado tends more to the first option: the idea of the Pope as lord of the world is in these bulls, though not actually expressed.
“The Alexandrine Bulls, which confer dominion in the New World on Spain (leaving aside for now the question of their true juridical force), represent the final major act of papal temporal sovereignty.” (p. 347) When a new continent was discovered, with splendid nerve the Borgia Pope came forward as ultimate lord of the world to dole out territories to the deserving. He laid down only one condition: the sovereigns were obliged to spread Christianity among the inhabitants of their new territories.
And so, European colonialism was launched with a papal blessing. The Pope did not show the slightest awareness of the possibility that the peoples “discovered” in the west might have some right to their own self-government. It would not be true to say that this idea, applied to the late 15th century, is an anachronism. People of that time thought of it, said it and wrote it. (Not, however, those people who are called humanists. It was the humanists who developed the main alternative argument for conquest, as opposed to simple papal donation: that certain peoples are inferior by nature, incapable of governing themselves properly, and they need their natural superiors to govern them.) (3)
Anti-colonial thinking in the age of Columbus was mainly to be found among the Dominican monks. Their General, Tommaso Cajetan, stated in a book published in 1517: “Some infidels do not fall under the temporal jurisdiction of Christian princes either in law or in fact. Take as an example the case of pagans who were never subjects of the Roman Empire, and who dwell in lands where the term 'Christian' was never heard. For surely the rulers of such persons are legitimate rulers… No king, no emperor, not even the Church of Rome, is empowered to undertake war against them for the purpose of seizing their lands or reducing them to temporal subjection. Such an attempt would be based upon no just cause of war.” Cajetan said that preachers should be sent to these lands to convert the inhabitants peacefully, “but men ought not to be sent with the purpose of crushing, despoiling and tempting unbelievers, and making them twofold more the children of hell”. (Quoted by Tuck pp. 69-70.)
Tuck argues that this view had deep roots in Dominican tradition, deriving from Thomas Aquinas. The Dominicans definitely did not see the Pope (or anyone else) as lord of the world. “The marked feature of this tradition was that, while they agreed wholeheartedly with the Augustinian and the canonist theory of war as governed by the principles of a general legal code, they disagreed equally profoundly with any theory of world authority, preferring instead a vision of a world of independent and equal political communities.” (Tuck p. 68) The views that Cajetan expressed were commonplace in his order. Some Spanish Dominicans, without telling the king in so many words that he ought to give back their colonies, were prepared to take this position publicly. (Charles V became worried and demanded that any Dominican lectures on this theme be submitted for censorship before they were delivered.)
On the “Indian” side some people expressed themselves more plainly. The cacique of Cenu, a minor lord in Central America, insisted on having the formal Spanish sovereignty claim (“Requirement”) translated and explained to him. His response is recorded by an early Spanish writer (1519), cited by Lewis Hanke. “The part about there being one God who ruled heaven and earth he approved; as for the pope who gave away lands that he didn’t own, he must have been drunk; and a king who asked for and acquired such a gift must have been crazy.” (4)