IEREG4

The Bull Romanus Pontifex (1455) and the early European trading in sub-Saharan Atlantic Africa.

IN 1460, AN INTERLOPER captured while trading in West Africa without a licence (2) was publicly tortured on the wheel and burned at the stake, together with his illicitly obtained gold and the weapons that he had been accused of selling to the “Infidel.” (3) His treatment might appear disproportionate to the offence, but for the terms of the bull Romanus Pontifex, issued on 8 January 1455 [1454] (4) by Pope Nicholas V and subsequently confirmed by Pope Calixtus III, on 13 March 1456, (5) and his successors. (6) The bull empowered the Portuguese justices to treat the unlucky trader as a heretic and traitor to Christianity, justly punished for holding in contempt the authority of the Pope, the supreme arbiter in matters involving interactions with non-Christians. The fact that such infractions were commonplace and went unpunished in the multifaceted contacts and interchanges among members of different religions on both sides of the Mediterranean was of no help to him. He was enmeshed in an effort to consolidate the right of the Portuguese Crown to control access to the south Atlantic and to the “Indies,” a right recently granted by the Papacy to the King Dom Afonso V and his uncle, Infante Dom Henrique, as a reward for services rendered to God and Church. The interloper’s execution served both as an advertisement of the law and a warning to other potential offenders.

In the opening stages of the European overseas expansion, territorial claims and overlordship rights presented the contemporaries with a set of complex problems in the areas of sovereignty, royal power, and regalian rights. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins were explored in rapid progression, in the course of a century. As the sea lanes were being opened to European traffic, the early contestants, the kings of Portugal and Castile, not only laid claim to sovereignty and regalian rights over the new territories on the grounds of either “reconquest” or “prior discovery” but claimed them as part of royal patrimony, seeking to prevent others from commercial access to those territories or regulate it to royal advantage. The Portuguese Crown originally attempted to claim dominium over the African enterprise on the grounds of first discovery by its subjects and the absence of prior claim by another Christian monarch. In such circumstances, all unassigned or newly acquired resources belonged to the Crown and the King had the right to use them as he saw fit. This principle would allow the Crown to control the overseas traffic to West Africa and to claim first rights to any profits. In the absence of prior customary practices. Exemptions or entitlements conceded his subjects, the king had the right to decide how the kingdom’s resources were to be used for common good and to divide the available wealth among his followers. Such claims were quite contestable and were often ignored or disputed. (7)

Religious sanction and invocation of papal authority provided the secular authority with moral and spiritual authority that lay custom and law by itself could not generate. The bull Romanus Pontifex established a power-relations blueprint for the entire early stage of the overseas expansion, by granting the right of access, conquest, and commerce to the Portuguese Crown and to Infante Dom Henrique (Henry the Navigator), as a reward for their past services and in recognition of their moral and religious reliability in dealing with non-Christians. The Bull privileged Infante Dom Henrique and his sovereign, the King of Portugal, side by side. Illogical as it may seem to modern eyes, the measure was consistent with the social and political context that generated it. Although the first overseas explorations were undertaken on the initiative of private persons, such as Infante Dom Henrique and Infante Dom Pedro, the Portuguese Crown had the paramount claim to any tangible results of such ventures because they were carried out by sworn vassals of the king, in the name of the king and for the “service to God and the King.”

The Romanus Pontifex was based on a convoluted and highly adaptive web of precedents, building on the legal reasoning and diplomatic practices that emerged over several centuries in response to the expanding trade with the Muslim world, the Crusades, and the Iberian Reconquest. Like the preceding papal decrees, the Bull combined, in a curious way, feudal principles, christocentric and ultramontist political philosophy, and the Thomist philosophy of natural law. The combination of these ideas and practices, very reactively applied depending on circumstances, was very reflective of the social forces controlling the early expansion and commerce. Its success as a political and legal tool also demonstrates the power of prescriptive ideology, despite being wielded by an institution whose prestige and effectiveness was as heavily compromised as that of the fifteenth-century Papacy.

The Romanus Pontifex was actively solicited and lobbied for by the Portuguese in Rome and was issued in the context of adversarial diplomatic relations between Portugal and Castile in the 1440s and early 1450s. (8) Overseas claims were only one part of the broader conflicts stemming from domestic power struggles in both countries but they came into a sharp focus when King Juan II laid in 1454 a full claim to southern Atlantic by claiming that all regions bordering on Morocco had been reserved for Castilian conquest since the thirteenth century. The diplomatic crisis was triggered in 1453 by a Portuguese attack on an interloping Andalusian fleet returning from Guinea. (9) The Portuguese response to threats of war was an appeal of papal authority, given that secular arguments had proved insufficient. Castile filed a similar appeal. (10)

At that point, Castile and Portugal had been sporadically wrangling about overseas claims for more than a century. These arguments centred on the rights to conquest in Morocco and the Canary Islands, citing both religious and secular principles. (11) The key secular principles that the Portuguese Crown had originally employed to justify its rights in central and southern Atlantic were the “vacancy” principle (empty lands and lands not claimed by another, especially Christian, political authority) and the entitlements stemming from suzerainty, such as supreme authority over new lands discovered by subjects and agents, in this case Infante Dom Henrique. As early as 1443 the Portuguese Crown declared that Dom Henrique, intending to be of service to the King and God, “undertook to send ships to make known lands beyond Cape Bojador that no one in the Christian commonwealth had specific knowledge of and neither sailing maps nor mapae mundi had made it clear whether they were populated or not” and was therefore entitled to control access to them, as a privilege and reward from the Crown. (12)

Such arguments were sufficient only if not challenged. When Juan II of Castile issued a counter-claim in 1453, (13) he challenged the right of his Portuguese counterpart to trade and carry out conquests in Africa, alleging that historically Castile had an exclusive right over enterprises on the African continent, granted by the Papacy. (14) Such a claim was controversial. The Portuguese had amassed a collection of papal bulls and letters dating back to the fourteenth century and continuing into the fifteenth, authorizing the Portuguese monarchs to make war in Morocco, and Portuguese prelates to preach crusades against the Maghribi Muslims. (15) The Bull Preclaris tue devotionis, issued in 1437 and confirmed in 1442, allowed the King of Portugal and his licence-holders to trade with “the Saracens and Infidels of all varieties” in any commodities except the prohibited ones. (16) Although much briefer, Nicholas V’s Bull Divino amore communiti, issued on 18 June 1452, represents a direct precursor to the Romanus Pontifex of 1455 in terms of wording, such as the reduction of all enemy “infidel” to “perpetual servitude” although it refers specifically to a cruzade against the Sarracens. (17) The Castilians however were similarly well equipped with papal documents authorizing conquests in North Africa and in the Atlantic. The more specific issue of the Canary Islands clearly favoured Castile’s precedence in the Atlantic, despite clear evidence of Portuguese expeditions and supporting diplomatic activity in the fourteenth century. (18) The Portuguese, on their part, were able to document, in great detail, papal authorization for all their actions in North Africa and the Atlantic since the end of the Great Schism.

Both parties agreed, at least formally, that the legitimacy of their overseas activities depended on papal sanction and asked the Holy See to arbitrate. (19) What Walter Ullman so fittingly called the “theocentric and christocentric outlook” of the earlier Middle Ages (20) showed remarkable tenacity not only in papal ideology but, when needed, in the secular sphere as well, despite the decline in the power and moral authority of the late medieval Papacy. According to this perspective, the Pope was a “vice-regent of God on Earth” endowed with absolute sovereignty, the plentitudo potestatis, which he wielded for the higher benefit of his flock, and was accountable only to God. (21) In the ultramontist interpretation, all Christians, “including kings and emperors, were consequently viewed as subditi, as subjects…” of the Papacy (22) Secular rulers were primary executors of papal will—defenders of peace and administrators of pope-determined justice in the temporal sphere.The Pope always remained in possession of his superior and sacred authority (auctoritas sacrata) and therefore in position of ultimate sovereignty even if for the sake of expediency he chose to delegate a segment of his plentitudo potestatis to secular rulers. (23) It is certainly true that the ultramontist viewpoint was in the High and Late Middle Ages increasingly giving way to a dualistic concept of a division between the temporal and spiritual sphere. (24)

Territorial sovereignty of secular rulers however was perceived in terms of delegation of the plentitudo potestas by the de iure sovereign. (25) This was particularly important where the secular ruler was also a vassal of the Pope as a feudal overlord, which was the case of the King of Portugal. Other jurists of the High Middle Ages increasing differentiated between de iure and de facto situations, the de facto ones increasingly gaining in importance. (26) The point is, however, that the older paradigm was still present and ready to serve as a justificatory tool if necessary.

As long as the belief in the total nature of the Christian experience was sustained, Christians were bound by their membership in the mystical corpus Christi and subject to rules pervading every aspect of their life, rules set by the Christ’s temporal vicars. In this sense, the rules applied only to Christians, in a stark difference to the homo animalis living in the base fallen state ensured by the Original Sin and devoid of the redeeming grace of baptism. (27) However, the absolute nature of the papal powers was easily extendable to include the entire humanitas. Pope Urban IV asserted claim to the authority of his office over all humanity, Christian and heathen. 28 In the thirteenth century, Cardinal Hostiensis argued that Christ’s first coming nullified the dominion homo animalis had over the world and that the Catholic universitas under the leadership of the Pope was the only lawful form of socio-political organization. The non-Christian rulers therefore did not possess a legimate title to their posessions and were subject to conquest that would bring them under the papal rule. (29)

Hostiensis’ view stood in contrast with the Thomist school of natural law. (30) St. Thomas Acquinas managed to find a common ground for both Christian and non-Christian human begins on the ground that they all were God’s creatures and shared the reflection of “divine light” which manifested itself through natural reason which in turn reflected the God-inserted lex naturalist. (31) Without the benefit of baptism, humans existed in a state of nature and were limited to the temporal, lower ordo in rebus. The divine grace contained in baptism made it possible for humans to transcend to the super-natural state. (32) The natural reason was manifest in the human tendency to form political communities. Thus the state was the natural human society, legitimate regardless of the religion of the ruler or inhabitants. (33) A.C. Saunders summed up the Thomist-based position of the thirteenth century very succinctly:

   … the pope was entrusted with the spiritual welfare (i.e. Christianization) of the world and the regulations of the Christian Dealings with the infidel. Crusades were not, however, the primary Mode of Christianization: instead of granting lands for conquest, The pope could assign exclusive fields of missionary work. War Against the infidel was not wholly rejected, for both Innocent and Thomas agreed that Christians could justly make war on unbelievers Who impeded proselytization, and Innocent also permitted Christians To make war on unbelievers who disobeyed natural law. (34)

For the purposes of the Portuguese Crown, the potential weakness of the Romanus Pontifex proved to be the fact that its arguments were derived from older, crusading bulls, with emphasis on religious war and conquest. Portugal was in no position to attempt direct rule or impose “perpetual servitude” upon the inhabitants of coastal Africa (not to mention the Indian Subcontinent). The need to institute peaceful relations with overseas rulers and equitable relations with native populations very quickly called for appropriate adjustments in the language of official documents and necessitated skillful reformulation of the justification of Portuguese sovereignty.

As A. C. Saunders has shown, this effect was craftily achieved by a redefinition of the concept of “conquest”. The rhetoric of military subjugation gave way to the idea of conquest by peaceful interaction (“… trautos e composycoes amjgaues”). (55) Conquest and physical extermination of the Infidel as the proclaimed aim of the Portuguese King was replaced by a more sustainable concept of forwarding the interest of Christianity by indirect means: good example, proselytizing and economic strategy. (56) The last argument—acquisition of wealth needed for strategic warfare against the Infidel and diversion of key resources—became increasingly important in justifying the predominantly commercial character of the interaction between the Christian Europeans and non-Christian Africans and Asians. (57) Fernandes de Lucena, the Portuguese ambassador to the papal court empowered to deliver the “Obedience” to the new pope, Innocent VIII, declared that the contact with the Portuguese transformed Senegalese Africans, a “… wild and barbarous tribe, dedicated to lust and sloth, devoid of charity and living like cattle … “ into a truly human society on the verge of conversion. Trade with these convertible pagans resulted, according to de Lucena, in the end of all trading with stubborn enemies of Christianity (ie. The North African Muslims), and the profits from the new trade were being used to finance a war against the latter. (58) However, the religiously motivated need to justify this interaction with non-Christian led to such excesses as the conceptualization of the trade as “ransom”: the Christians did not trade but “ransom” (resgatar) merchandise of a higher order for lesser goods. (59)

Although the key concepts of the Romanus Pontifex were mired in the past and the document itself aimed largely at ensuring a diplomatic solution to an impending conflict between Portugal and Castile, and at generating material benefits for the Portuguese Crown, its impact was much broader and more enduring. The Romanus Pontifex marked not only a major diplomatic defeat for Castile but established a power-relations blueprint for the entire early stage of the European overseas expansion, the legacy of which was defeated only by the Reformation and ultimately the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. It also provided a platform and a weapon for secular legislation governing trade with Atlantic Africa and eventually Asia. The argumentation, design and content of the Romanus Pontifex was reflected in the second crucial papal bull, Alexander Vl’s Inter Caetera of 3 May 1493, also drafted to suit royal supporters, this time Isabela and Ferdinand of Spain. (60) It is almost ironic that the Romanus Pontifex was based on an extremely conservative set of prerogatives that mixed pre-thirteenth century, militantly christocentric views reflective of Hostiensis’ extreme position with some of the aggressive manifestations of Innocent IV’s attitude to nonChristians.

However, the threat of excommunication, a spiritual punishment heavily used and abused in late medieval Portugal, (76) was not the main threat to transgressors that the Romanus Pontifex represented. Excommunication in itself did not have immediate drastic consequences because the objective was to achieve reconciliation with the Church. The offender was however obliged to pay a stiff fine for each day under excommunication in the case of individuals or under interdict in the case of corporate bodies. (77) The main import of the Romanus Pontifex was in the moral and spiritual authority it provided to secular legislation aimed at securing the Crown’s benefits from its rights over access to the south Atlantic. (78)

The Portuguese Crown heavily emphasized and widely publicized the terms and principles of the Bull Romanus Pontifex. A summary of the bull was to be read and posted in the principal churches of all the metropolitan Portuguese bishoprics, in the church of Sao Jorge da Mina, and the main churches of Cape Verde Islands, Madeira and the Azores. The archbishop of Lisbon and the bishops of Silves, Ceuta, Evora, and Porto were authorized to execute the necessary spiritual punishments. (79) The public summary stated unequivocally that the lordship over the “lands, islands, ports and trade of Guinea” belonged to the Kings of Portugal and that nobody was to go there or send merchandise there without licence, under the pain of excommunication. Municipalities that would either trade in prohibited commodities or harbour offenders were threatened with an interdict. (80)

All royal decrees that followed the Romanus Pontifex forcefully stressed the Crown’s rights as the designated beneficiary of the West African trade. It was therefore up to the King to determine whether the Crown would trade directly and exclusively, or extend trading privileges to others in order to obtain political or economic benefits, or simply open up the trade and tax it. The political obligations of the King to act in the interests of his subjects and of his economic self-interest were often in conflict, and the decisions regulating contacts with the overseas regions were often ad hoc, contradictory, fragmented and confused. For most of the early period of the expansion, until the early 1500s, the legislation relevant to the overseas enterprise took form of individual decrees and charters, showing an increasing severity in the prescribed punishments, even for minor offences. While in the 1440s interloping in West Africa was punishable only by confiscation of property, with the Romanus Pontifex it became a capital crime. The Church provided the secular arm of the law with an offence punishable by burning at the stake and in at least one case, that of the ill-fated interloper caught by Diogo Gomes off the coast of Senegal, it was carried out. (81)

The first comprehensive royal decree regulating trade with West Africa was proclaimed in 1474. It was preceded by various measures limiting access to south Atlantic, including a number of Crown-defined monopolies on various trading regions and aspects of commerce, such as the contracts awarded to Fernao Gomes on the trade with Guinea between 1469 and 1472, including an exclusive right to malagueta (grains of paradise) imports and re sale, and a similar exclusive contract on the import of ivory and resale in north-western Europe. The prescribed punishments grew even stiffer as time went by. Capital punishment was ordered not only for participation in interloping but also for smuggling, malfeasance in office, and fraudulent customs declaration. (82) In 1480, Dom Afonso ordered his sea captains not to bother bringing captured interlopers to Portugal for trial but simply toss them overboard to die “of natural causes.” (83) Obviously, this order was not necessarily obeyed. Eustache de la Fosse, a young subject of the Duke of Burgundy, who had been caught off the Gold Coast by Diogo Cao in 1479, lived to write about his voyage and died only four decades later, in 1523. (84) Only in the last decade of Dom Manuel’s reign (r. 1495-1521), an attempt was made to incorporate the laws pertaining to the overseas in the revised law code of the kingdom, the Ordenacoes Manuelinas. At that point, the Crown abandoned all semblance of impartiality and added new offences to those demanding capital punishment, including settling on the mainland among Africans. (85) The growing stringency of the laws was reinforced when Pope Leo granted in 1514 King Dom Manuel’s request and confirmed the terms of the Romanus Pontifex. (86)

The argument that the profits from the trade constituted a reward for services rendered by the Portuguese Crown to God and Christian Faith proved however very powerful in justifying the Crown policy with regard to the overseas enterprise. The Portuguese Crown was able, for example, to bring the flourishing trade of the Cape Verde Islands settlers to a near ruin in 1517-1520 by accusing them of Tese majeste and, more specifically, of high treason, on the grounds that they posed too stiff a competition to the inefficient royal enterprise and deprived thus the Portuguese Crown of its designated benefits. (87) The terms of the Romanus Pontifex were clearly reflected in the formulation and force of the royal claims and continued to bring the Crown considerable advantage three quarters of a century after its first issue.

The Romanus Pontifex was an on-demand papal pronouncement that built on a series of precedents seeking to assert the Pope’s suzereinty, if not sovereignty at this point, in temporal matters, stemming from his universal authority in the spiritual realm. The Bull was grounded in the harshest interpretations of the Christian relations with the religious “others” and their right (or lack of it) to temporal dominium. Its thrust, however, reflected the argumentative skill of the royal officials and diplomats who championed the interests of their secular masters, rather than an authoritative, informed, and impartial canonical pronouncement. Despite its heavy impact on the evolution on the European trade with Atlantic Africa in the opening decades of the expansion, the Romanus Pontifex was not a precursor of a mercantilist charter and its purpose was not to authorize a monopoly on the trade with sub-Saharan Africa. It was a political document aimed at securing sovereign rights not to territory but to access to the southern Atlantic. Commercial and other economic advantages were incorporated as a sub-category of a very sweeping language of geo-political preferment. The ecclesiastical sanction and the reward-for-services-to-God clauses proved an extraordinarily powerful weapon for the Portuguese Crown in enforcing this preferment both at home and abroad. The luckless interloper burned in 1460 for trading without a licence was caught in a complex web of circumstances combining a new maritime trading system with a political and legal tradition of expansion grounded in the crusading and reconquest traditions of medieval Iberia and in the deeply personal nature of the ties governing the relationship between the Crown and its subjects, which disadvantaged outsiders lacking relevant social and political capital.

Ivana Elbl

Trent University

(1) An earlier, working version of this paper was published on-line, as part of the proceedings of the 8^th European Social Science History Conference, Ghent (Belgium), April 2010, http://www2.iisg.nl/esshc/programme.asp?selyear=io&pap=7949.

(2) The contemporary term licenca, although it best translates as “licence,” should not be confused as referring to modern commercial licensing. It was used in a much wider context and signified an authorization/permission granted by a pertinent authority

(3) Diogo Gomes, As viagens dos descobrimentos, ed. J.M. Garcia (Lisbon: Presenca, 1983), 46-7.

(4) The year of the Bull is actually listed as 1454 (… anno jncarnationis dominice millesimo quadringentesimo quinquagesimo quarto…) (Antonio J. Dias Dinis, ed., Monumenta Henricina, 15 vols. (Coimbra: Comissao Executiva das Comemoracoes de V Centenario da Morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1960-1974), 12: 79), but at this time the Papal chancery continued the practice of using Easter as the beginning of a new year. Documents dated in the first three months of the year thus fall into the next calendar year, depending of the date of Easter in any given year.

The original of the bull is preserved in Arquivos Nacionais/Torre do Tombo (Lisbon) (AN/TT), Bulas, maco 7, doc. 29. For a listing of archival copies and their locations, as well as editions of the document, see Dias Dinis, Monumenta Henricina, 12: 72. For a bilingual edition of the Bull see J.M. de Silva Marques, Os Descobrimentos Portugueses: documentos para a sua historia, 3 vols. And Suppl. To Vol. 1 (Lisbon: Instituto para a Alta Cultura, 1944-71), 1: 503-8 (doc. 401, Latin original text) and 508-513 (doc. 402, Portuguese translation).

The Bull was followed on 22 April 1455 by an executory order, which named the archbishop of Lisbon and bishop of Silves as executive judges and was directed to a wide range of church officials, from abbots and priors of monasteries to rectors of parish churches, in Portugal and elsewhere, as relevant (Monumenta Henricina, 12: 118-21 (doc. 61); Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 525-7 (doc. 414); original in AN/TT, Bulas, maco 32, doc. 10). On 6 August 1455, there followed another executory order, naming the bishop of Ceuta as the executive judge and threatening with excommunication those who would refuse to obey or attack contumaciously the terms of the Bull and associated documents (Monumenta Henricina, 12: 162-6 (doc. 84); summary in Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 529-30 (doc. 417); original in AN/TT, Bulas, maco 33, doc. 14). On 5 October 1455 and 28 May 1456 the executory order was proclaimed from the pulpit of the Lisbon Cathedral and on the main entrance to the Lisbon Cathedral, addressed to “the cabido of the Cathedral, knights, squires, citizens, common people, and foreigners” (Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 540-1 (doc. 422).

1. Calixtus III, Inter cetera (13 March 1456), publ. In Monumenta Henricina, 12: 286-8 (doc. 137); and in Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 535-7 (doc. 420, Latin original) and 537-40 (doc. 421, Portuguese translation). Original in AN/TT, Gaveta, 7, maco 13, doc. 7.
2.  See for example Sixtus IV’s confirmatory bull of 21 June 1481 (Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 3: 222-9 (doc. 153, Latin original) and 230-8 (doc. 154, Portuguese translation); original in AN/TT, Bulas, maco 26, doc. 10, and archival copy in AN/TT, Gavetas, maco 2, doc. 17); and Leo X’s Bull Precelse deuotionis of 3 November 1514, published in Antonio Brasio, ed., Monumenta Missionaria Africana: Africa Ocidental (1500-01569), 2a serie (Lisbon: Agencia Geral do Ultramar, 1958), 2: 93-6 (doc. 29), original in AN/TT, Bulas, maco 29, doc. 6.
3.  For a seminal interpretation of the opening stages of the overseas expansion see Luis Filipe F. R. Thomaz, “Le Portugal et l’Afrique au XV siecle: Le debuts de l’expansion,” Arquivos do Centro Cultural Portugues (Paris) 26 (1989): 161-256; and Luis Filipe F. R. Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor (Lisbon: Diffel, 1994), chap. 1-3. See also A.H. de Oliveira Marques, ed., A expansao quatrocentista, vol. II of Nova historia da expansao portuguesa (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1998); and A.C. de C.M. Saunders, “The Depiction of Trade as War as a Reflection of Portuguese Ideology and Diplomatic Strategy in West Africa, 1441-1556,” Canadian Journal of History 17 (1982): 219-34.
4.  See Humberto Baquero Morenon, A batalha de Alfarrobeira, 2 vols. (Coimbra, 1979). For some specific examples see Alfonso Franco Silva, “Las intrigas politicas de Juan Pacheco: del combate de Olmedo a la muerte de Juan II (1445-1454),” Anuario de estudios medievales 37:2 (2007): 597-652; Paz Romero Portilla, “ El partido portugues en Castilla: siglo XV, pp 1245-53 in vol. 3 of Os Reinos ibericos na Idade Media: Livro de homenagem ao professor doutor Humberto Carlos Baquero Moreno, eds. Luis Adao da Fonseca, Luis Carlos Amaral, and Maria Fernanda Ferreira Santos, 3 vols. (Porto: Livraria Civilicao, 2003).
5.  W. Blake, Europeans in West Africa, 1450-1560, 2 vols. (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1942), i: 200-3.
6.  Antonio Garcia Garcia, “Las donaciones pontificias de territorios y su repercusion en la relaciones entre Castilla y Portugal,” in Las relaciones entre Portugal y Castilla, en la epoca de los descubrimientos y la expansion colonial, ponencias presentadas al congreso Hispano-Portugues celebrado en Salamanca, 1992), ed. Ana Maria Carabias Torres (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1994), 293-310.
7.  See for example the collection Las relaciones entre Portugal y Castilla, en la epoca de los descubrimientos y la expansion colonial, ponencias presentadas al congreso Hispano-Portugues celebrado en Salamanca, 1992, ed. Ana Maria Carabias Torres (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1994); Jose Enrique Lopez De Coca Castaner, “El papel de Granada en las relaciones castellano-portuguesas (1369-1492),” Espacio, tiempoy forma, ser. 3, 17 (2004): 339-351; Jose Enrique Lopez De Coca Castaner, “Granada y la expansion portuguesa en el Magreb extremo,” Historia. Instituciones. Documentos 25 (1998): 351-367; M. Carmen Sevilla Gonzalez, “La politica africana de Castilla y Portugal: la incorporacion de los archipielagos atlanticos,” in El Territori i les seves institutions historiques: Actes [de les jornades d’estudi commemoratives del 650e aniversari de la incorporacio definitiva del marge dret del riu Ebre a Catalunya, Asco, 28, 29 i 30 de Novembre de 1997], ed. Josep Serrano Daura (Barcelona: Fundacio Noguera, 1999), 535-45; Paz Romero Portilla, “La rivalidad luso-castellana desde 1415 a 1479 por la legitimidad sobre las tierras conquistadas,” in La Peninsula Iberica en la Era de los Descubrimentos (1391-1492). Actas III Jornadas Hispano-Portuguesas de Historia Medieval, ed. Manuel Gonzalez Jimenez (Sevile: Junta de Andalucia. Consejeria de Cultura, 1997), 11: 1745-52; Jean-Pierre Tardieu, “La “Mina de Oro”: du conflit luso-castillan aux traites d’Alcacovas (1479) et de Tordesillas (1494), Bulletin hispanique 96:1 (1994): 117-131.
8.  … se meteo a mandar seus naujos a saber parte de terra que era alem do cabo de bojador por que atee Enta no auja njgem na cristendade que dello soubesse parte nem sabiam se avia la poboraca ou no nem djreitamente nas cartas de marear nem mapamundo … (ANTT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 24, fl. 61; publ. In J. M. De Silva Marques, Os Descobrimentos Portugueses: documentos para a sua historia, 3 vols. And Suppl. To Vol. 1 (Lisbon: Instituto para a Alta Cultura, 1944-71), 1: 435 (doc. 339).
9.   W. Blake, West Africa, Quest for Cod and Gold, 1454-1578, 2^nd ed. (London: Curzon Press, and Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 17-19. For more recent discussions see Manuel Gonzales Jimenez, “Las relaciones entre Portugal e Castilla en el siglo XV (1411-1474),” in El Tratado de Tordesillas y su Epoca. Congresso Internacional de Historia ([Valladolid]: Junta de Castilla y Leon; [Tordesillas]: V Centenario del Tratado de Tordesillas; [Setubal]: Comemoracoes Descobrimentos Portugeses, 1995), 781-92; and Paulino Castaneda, “Las exploraciones castellanas y los problemas con Portugal antes de 1492,” in El Tratado de Tordesillas y su Epoca. Congresso Internacional de Historia, 913-934.
10.  Blake, Europeans, 1: 201-202.
11.  See for example Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 120 (doc. 46); 1: 52-3; 1: 66-74 (docs. 64 and 65); 1: 83-4 (doc. 71); 1: 98-103 (doc. 81).
12.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 378-80 (doc. 325); 1: 411 (doc. 325).
13.  Published in Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 492-3 (doc. 393).
14.  See P.E. Russel, “El descubrimiento de Canarias y el debate medieval acerca de los derechos de los principes y pueblos paganos,” Revista de Historia Canaria XXXVI (1978): 932; and Joseph F. O’Callaghan, “Castile, Portugal, and the Canary Islands: Claims and Counterclaims, 1344-1479,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1993): 287-309; Peter Russell, Prince Henry ‘The Navigator’: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), chap. II; Francisco Morales Padron, Descubrimiento, toma de posesion, conquista. Canarias: una modesta America (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Ediciones del Cabildo de Gran Canaria, 2009).
15.  All the peninsular kingdoms and high-ranking nobles has well-established links to the Curia and successive popes. See for example Oscar Villarroel Gonzalez, “El papado y la monarquia de Juan II de Castilla (1406-1454) en un inventario de documentacion pontificia de los Reyes Catolicos,” En la Espana medieval 23 (2000): 137-187; Jose Manuel Nieto Soria, “Enrique IV de Castilla y el Pontificado (1454-1474),” En la Espana medieval, 19 (1996): 167-238. For a historiographical survey see Jorge Diaz Ibanez, “El pontificado y los reinos peninsulares durante la Edad Media: balance historiografico,” En la Espana medieval 24 (2001): 465-536; Alvaro Fernandez de Cordova Miralles, “Imagen de los Reyes Catolicos en la Roma pontificia,” En la Espana medieval 28 (2005): 259-354.
16.  Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1966), 25.
17.  This power was vested, according to St. Matthew, in St. Peter by Christ himself, assuring his that “… quodque solveris super terram, erit solutum et in coelis” (Matt, xvi, 18-19) (Quoted in Ullmann, Principles, 32).
18.  
19. Ullmann, Principles, 64-65. In other words, the Pope wielded indivisible and superior auctoritas sacrata, a principle which deprived secular monarchs of full sovereignty (Ullmann, Principles, 72).
20.  Ullmann, Principles, 72.
21.  See the arguments of J.A. Watt, K. Pennington, and J. P. Canning in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (J.A. Watt, “Spiritual and Temporal Powers,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-C1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 367-423; K. Pennington, “Law, Legislative Authority and Theories of Government, 1150-1300,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, 424-53; J.P. Canning, “Law, Sovereignty and Corporation Theory, 1300-1400,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, 454-76.
22.  Canning, “Law,” 465.
23.  Canning, “Law,” 465-8.
24.  Ullmann, Principles, 32-3.
25.  Urban IV declared that “dedit enim Dominus nobis sua, quia subjecit omnia sub pedibus nostris et super universas terrae creaturas, contulit nobis dominii principatum (quoted in Ullmann, Principles, p. 53). In the eleventh and twelfth century the militant Popes of the early Crusades saw “holy” war as the most natural interaction between Christians and non-Christians. For an excellent discussion of this period see John Gilchrist, “The Papacy and War against the “Saracens’5 795-1216,” The International History Review, 10 (1988), pp. 174-197.
26.  Henricus de Segusio, Cardinal Hostiensis (d. 1271), Summa Aurea (Lyons, 1586), V (quoted in M. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1963), 419, n. 2).
27.  Canning, “Law”; 465.
28.  Ullmann, Principles, 245-6.
29.  Canning, “Law” 465. However, the lower, natural existence no longer precluded grace.
30.  Ullmann, Principles, pp. 245-7.
31.  Saunders, “The Depiction of Trade, 232.
32.  The leading authority on this subject is James Muldoon. See James Muldoon, “Auctoritas, potestas and World Order,” in Plenitude of Power: The Doctrines and Exercise of Authority in the Middle Ages. Essays in Memory of Robert Louis Benson, ed. By Robert C. Figueira (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 125-39; James Muldoon, “Crusading and Canon Law,” in Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, ed. Helen J. Nicholson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3757; James Muldoon, “Tolerance and Intolerance in the Medieval Canon Lawyers,” in Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades, ed. Michael Gervers and James M. Powell, 2001), I17-23; James Muldoon, Canon law, the Expansion of Europe and World Order (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the non-Christian world, 1250-1550 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979).
33.  For an interesting discussion see Antony J. Black, “Diplomacy, Doctrine and the Disintegration of an Idea into Politics,” in Studien zum 15. Jahrhundert: Festschrift fur Erich Meuthen, ed. Johannes Helmrath, Heribert Muller, and Helmut Wolff (Munchen: Oldenbourg, 1994), 1: 77-85.
34.  he Pope struggled, for example, to provide protection and a degree of security to the inhabitants of the Canary Islands who in the first half of the fifteenth century became literally fair game to Iberian nobles in search of an easy crusading area. See for example, the strongly worded Regimini gregis (Sep 29, 1434) which threatens excommunication to those terrorized the inhabitants of the Canaries (Monumenta Henricina, 5: 90-3).
35.  Monumenta Henricina, 5: 271-5. He at the last moment also added twenty years of plenary indulgencies (Monumenta Henricina, 6: 37-9 (doc. 19) and half-a-dizima from newly cultivated Church lands (Monumenta Henricina, 6: 62 (doc. 31)).
36.  See for example Monumenta Henricina, 4: 213-20, 303-5; 5: 240-8, 259-60; 6: 9-11.
37.  For poignant examples of the fifteenth-century Papacy see the collected studies of Thomas M. Izbicki, Reform, Ecclesiology, and the Christian Life in the Late Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), particularly “Reject Aeneas! Pius II on the Errors of his Youth,” (187203); and Thomas M. Izbicki and Christopher M. Bellitto, eds. Reform and Renewal in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Louis Pascoe, S.J. (Leiden, 2000). See also Martin John Cable, “Cuius regio, eius … Papa?” The decree on “Real Obedience” at the Council of Constance (1414-18),” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stifungfur Rechtsgeschichte. Kanonistische Abteilung 125 (2008): 66-102.
38.  John A.F. Thompson, Popes and Princes, 1417-1517. Politics and Polity in the Late Medieval Church (London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1980), 115-117.
39.  On the influence of the Curia in this period see Thompson, Popes and Princes, 96-9.
40.  Monumenta Henricina, 9: 300-1.
41.  Some historians see the papal pronouncement authorizing the Portuguese Crown to subjugate hostile Muslims and pagans “in perpetuam seruitutem” as a conscience-salving dispensation to engage in slave trade and slavery in a society where slavery had gone out of practice and that this was one of main objectives Infante Dom Henrique had hoped to secure from the Bull (see for example Russell, Prince Henry, 250). For a broader discussion, see A.J. R. Russell-Wood, “Iberian Expansion and the Issue of Black Slavery: Changing Portuguese Attitudes, 1440-1770,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 16-42; A.C. de C.M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1444-1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982, 2^nd. Ed. 2010), chap. 2 (“Legal and philosophical justifications of the slave-trade”); Russell, Prince Henry, chap. 10 (“Prince Henry and the Atlantic Slave Trade”), and the passages on slavery in Guiseppe Marcocci, L’invenzione di un Imperio. Politica e cultura nel mondo portoghese (1450-1600) (Rome: Carocci editore, 2011).
42.  This is quite unlikely. Among other reasons, slavery was part of the Portuguese legal practice and was codified in the Ordenacoes Afonsinas, the compilation of which preceded the Bull and the slave raids along Mauretanian and Senegalese coast in the 1440s. The question here is rather the question of ransom and ransomability. While in the contemporary practice there is some distinction between slaves and captives, slaves could be ransomed and their status became permanent only if ransom failed, the Portuguse application of term “ransom” (resgate) could refer to any commodity, not only slaves, that was purchased from non-Christians, for the greater glory or advantage of Christians. See below.
43.  Nicholaus … Romanus Pontifex … et Vicarius Jhesus Christi cuncta mundi climata omniumque nationum in illis degentium qualitates paterna consideratione discutiens as salutem querens at appetens singulorum illa propensa deliberatione salubriter ordinat et disponit que grata diuine maiestati fore conscipit et per que oues sibi diuinitus creditas ad unicum ouile dominicum reducat et adquirat eis felicitatis eterne premium (Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 503).
44.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 504-5.
45.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 504.
46.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 505-6 (doc. 420).
47.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 505.
48.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 505-507.
49.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 507.
50.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 507-8. For an actual printed notice see ANTT, Gaveta 10, maco 5, doc. 27. See also Ch. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (New York: Knopf, 1969), 22.
51.  For interesting comparative material see Teofilo F. Ruiz, “Trading with the “Other”: Economic Exchanges between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in late medieval northern Castile,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict and Coexistence. Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 6378; Rasa J. Mazeika, “Of Cabbages and Knights: Trade and Trade Treaties with the Infidel on the Northern Frontier, 1200-1390,” Journal of Medieval History 20 I (1994): 63-76; Gregory O’Malley, “Pilgrimage, Crusades, Trade and Embassy: Pre-Elizabethan English Contacts with the Ottoman Turks,” Crusades 3 (2004): 153-170.
52.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 505 and 507. The canon law viewed both commerce and merchants askance, as the titles of the these two articles well reflect: Vito Piergiovanni, “Il mercante e il diritto canonico medievale: “Mercatores in itinere dicuntur miserabiles personae,” in Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, San Diego, University of California at La Jolla, 21-27 August 1988, ed. Stanley Chodorow (Citta del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1992), 617-31; Andre Vauchez, “”Homo mercator vix aut nunquam potest Deo placere”: quelques reflexions sur l’attitude des milieux ecclesiastiques face aux nouvelle formes de l’activite economique du XIIe et au debut du XlIIe siecle,” in Le Marchand au Moyen Age. Actes du 19 congres de la Societe des historiens medievistes de l’Enseignement superieur public, Reims, 1988 (Saint-Herblain: S.H.M.E.S./CID Editions, 1992), 211-7. For a still unsurpassed discussion of this issue see John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (London and Melbourne, New York: MacMillan and St. Martin’s P., 1969).
53.  Monumenta Henricina, 12: 4.
54.  For a more detailed discussion see Saunders, “The Depiction,” 225-30.
55.  Saunders, “The Depiction,” 225-28.
56.   Fernandes de Lucena, The Obedience of a King of Portugal, trans. And ed. F.M. Rogers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 47.
57.  These rationalizations were widely accepted. The main argument of Edward IV in his bid to have the Guinea trade opened to the English was that “…it is advantageous to the christian religion that wealth and other things, precious for their natural excellence, should be drawn into its power from the hands of the infidels, …[through] traffic and the exchange of baser merchandise for nobler … (Blake, Europeans, 2:297).
58.  For the full text of the bull see, for example, Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 374-6. The language of the Inter Caetera on the treatment of the native people is much milder that that of the Romanus Pontifex, stressing peaceful conversion methods.
59.  Blake offered this interpretation first in his article “The organization of Portuguese Trade with West Africa during the Sixteenth Century,” in Congresso do Mundo Portugues, 19 vols. (Lisbon: Comissao Executiva dos Centenarios, 1940), V, t. 3: 33-51, and kept insisting on the applicability of the “monopoly concept” throughout his scholarly career. See his West Africa. Quest for Cod and Gold, 73-7.
60.  See for example. A.H. de Oliveira Marques, ‘A expansao no Atlantico,” in A expansao quatrocentista, vol. II of Nova historia da expansao portuguesa, ed. J. Serrao and A.H. de Oliveira Marques (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1998), 40, 74; Joao Paulo Oliveira e Costa, Henrique, O Infante (Lisbon: A Esfera dos Livros, 2009), 345. This may a matter of semantics, “monopoly” serving as a synonym for “exclusive rights.” The term, however, is cogent with the concept of “capitalismo monarquico portugues, that was coined by Manuel Nunes Dias and that continues to carry currency (Manuel Nunes Dias, O capitalismo monarquico portugues (1415-1549), 2 vols. (Coimbra: Instituto de Estudos Historicos Dr. Antonio de Vasconcelos, 1964).
61.  The term “monopoly” has two basic meanings: an economic one and a figurative one. The first can be defined as “exclusive ownership (or control) through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action” and the second as “exclusive possession” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield: G. & C. Merriam, 1979), 739. If the broad meaning of the word is accepted, we could even say that a king has a monopoly on his kingdom or that a man has a monopoly on his house. In such a context the term “monopoly” sounds obviously awkward. Yet both examples qualify as an “exclusive possession”. “Monopoly” however, is not a synonym for ownership. Moreover, there is a difference between exclusive rights stemming from a political context and those that are economic in nature. Even the etymology of the word—from the Greek “monopolion”—“sell alone”—supports it For a more extensive discussion of the term and concept of monopoly see Brooks Kaiser, “Market Structure: Monopoly and “Natural Monopoly,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, ed. Joel Mokyr, e-reference edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 and 2005), Trent University, 29 March 2010, http://www.oxford-economichistory. Com/entry? Entry=t168.e0475.s0003.
62.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 505-507.
63.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 505.
64.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 507.
65.  Malyn Newitt reached a similar conclusion in his A history of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400-1668 (London and New York: Routledge Taylor @ Francis Group, 2006), 30. For an alternative analysis, see Marcocci, L invenzione, 27-44.
66.  
67. El Tumbo de los Reyes Catolicos del Consejo de Sevilla (Seville: Ed. Catolica Espanola, 192-868), 1: 63 (doc. 34).
68.  Blake, Europeans, 2: 297.
69.  Quoted in Thompson, Popes and Princes, 14. Piccolomini was elected Pope in 1458 and served under the name of Pius II until his death in 1464.
70.  For a comprehensive discussion see Ivana Elbl, “The King’s Business in Africa: Decision and Strategies of the Portuguese Crown,” in Lawrin Armstrong, Ivana Elbl and Martin Elbl, eds. Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of John H.A. Munro (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2007), 89-118.
71.  See the privileges to Dom Henrique in 1443, 1448 and 1449 (Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1, doc. 350, 360 and 363).
72.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 505 and 507.
73.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 505.
74.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 507.
75.  Representatives of the povo in Portuguese cortes frequently complained that prelates and church officials frequently used excommunication as a weapon to secure favourable judicial outcomes and non-interference by royal justices. See Armindo de Sousa, As Cortes Medievais Portuguesas (1385-1490), 2 vols (Porto: Instituto Nacional de Investigacao Cientifica. Centro de Historia da Universidade do Porto, 1990), 11: V Seccao.
76.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos, 1: 507.
77.  For the ideological weight of religion in the Portuguese overseas expansion see Luis Felipe Thomaz and Jorge Santos Alves, “Da cruzada ao Quinto Imperio,” in Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto, eds., A Memoria da Nacao (Lisbon: Livraria Sa da Costa, 1991), 81-164.
78.  AN/TT, Gaveta 10, maco 5, no. 27.
79.  AN/TT, Gaveta 10, maco 5, no. 27.
80.  Gomes, As Viagens, 46-7.
81.  Silva Marques, Descobrimentos Portugueses, 3: 154 (doc. 115).
82.  ANTT, Chancelaria de Dom Afonso, liv. 32, fo. 63.
83.  See Eustache de la Fosse (ca. 1451-1523), Voyage d’Eustache Delafosse sur la cote de Cuinee, au Portugal, et en Espagne: 1479-1481, ed. And trans. Denis Escudier, following Theodore Monod (Paris: Editions Changeigne, 1992).
84.  Brasio, Monumenta, 2a serie, 2: docs. 28, 44 and 45.
85.  Brasio, Monumenta, 2a serie, 2: 93-6 (doc. 29). For King Dom Manuel’s relations with Leo X see Silvio A. Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, 1997).
86.  Brasio, Monumenta, 2a serie, 2: docs. 20, 43, 45, 47.

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