Carving up the world

 “We’ll break our trip for one night in Tordesillas,” I was told as we drove out towards Cantabria, in Northern Spain, for a holiday with family.

Tordesillas: a fine place to break a long journey

I had no objection, especially as I understood it was a fine place to visit. It wasn’t till quite some time after we’d got there that I realised that the name of the place should have rung a bell, though it hadn’t. It was the site of a pretty significant incident, and I like to think I know about the history of such events.

It was galling that I hadn’t spotted it at once.

This was the place where the two leading powers of Europe of the time decide to carve up the world between them. 

In today’s Europe, it’s hard to think that it was those two nations that led the way, but that was the way things were back in 1494. Portugal was the first European nation to have started building an overseas Empire. And, just recently, Spain had sent Christopher Columbus out westward across the Atlantic in search of a new route to India. What he actually came across was the colossal double-continent in the way, the lands we now know as the Americas. That had happened only two years earlier: as we all learn as kids, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

On his return, he called in on Lisbon first and let the Portuguese king, John II, know about his discoveries. Which rather put the cat among the pigeons. After all, the Portuguese had a decree of the Pope, no less, saying that any lands ‘discovered’ south of the Canaries, would be theirs.

Because, of course, the Pope had every authority to make such a dispensation. And the people who actually lived in those places had obviously not discovered them, until Europeans got there.

“Hey, guys,” the new arrivals would say, “consider yourselves discovered.”

“What a relief,” the locals must have replied, “it was such a bore being undiscovered and not really counting for anything in the world.”

Or possibly not.

So here was the upstart Spain – and not even all of Spain, but just one of its two Kingdoms, Castile – poking around in what was obviously south of the Canaries and therefore clearly Portuguese.

The result was the meeting in Tordesillas. On the one hand, there was Isabel Queen of Castile, with her husband, Ferdinand King of Aragon, together the so-called Catholic monarchs of Spain. On the other hand, there was John II of Portugal. Both sides were accompanied by significant people supporting them, but not significant enough for me to remember their names or anything about them.

The decision was to split the world between Spain and Portugal. Any new lands ‘discovered’ to the west of a line of longitude running 270 leagues west of the islands of the Azores would be Spanish, anything east of it Spanish. That wasn’t particularly clear, since no one really agreed how long a league was, nor where in the Azores the measurement should be made from, but hey, it was good enough. It meant that most of what we now know as Eastern Brazil would be Portuguese, which is why modern Brazil speaks its version of that language, while the rest of what was to become Latin America would be Spanish.

Just over ten years later, the Pope endorsed the agreement, giving it divine authority. Or so everyone involved imagined. Or pretended to imagine. 

Ten or so years after that there was a debate about whether the dividing line continued all the way around the world, splitting Asia too between those powers. Further negotiations led to a new division out there as well.

The importance of all these decisions left me a little dumbfounded at not remembering any of it until I saw the monument in the city celebrating the event. That taught me a salutary lesson on how much history I simply don’t know, or have forgotten.

Monument to the Treaty and its main signatories

After all, it was a significant event, what with its papal endorsement and everything. Though perhaps more for what it left out than what it included.

For instance, it only involved Spain and Portugal among the European nations. Portugal was already a declining force. England and Holland were beginning to show the first stirrings of ambition. Meanwhile, there was a rising power that was already snapping at Spain’s heels and destined ultimately to overtake it, in the form of France. None of those nations were mentioned in the Treaty. Not even the Pope’s blessing was going to make those nations keen on accepting a partition of the world between two of their rivals.

Besides, less than a quarter of a century after the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Reformation would split Europe into Catholic and Protestant states. Protestants felt under no obligation whatever to accept the Pope’s authority on any of these matters. So, while Spain and Portugal more or less stuck to the Treaty, everyone else pretty much stuck two fingers up to it.

But, significant though all that is, it leaves out the most striking aspect of all in the grand negotiations at Tordesillas.

They made absolutely not mention whatever of the people who might actually be living in the lands these great powers were carving up between them. The ‘discovered’ people had no say in the negotiations, no rights confirmed by the treaty. Spain and Portugal were given possession of ‘new lands’, but those already living there were given possession of none, least of all their own.

No wonder we’re still having to say ‘Black Lives Matter’ five centuries later.

That aspect was far more eloquently captured by a street mural we came across in the city, than by any monument to the Treaty.

Spain and Portugal carving up the world. While an ‘Indian’ weeps at the rape of her lands