some portuguese paradigms for the discovery and conquest of spanish america

R d c c Studies Vol. 6 No. 3 4

Some Portuguese paradigms f o r the discovery and conquest of Spanzih America

P. E. RUSSELL

As is well known; the Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal (1494) established longitudinally in the Atlantic a navigational demarca- tion line between the two nascent colonial empires. Though this ceased long ago to have any political significance it st i l l survives symbolically in the minds of many of those who are concerned with the colonial history of either power. Thus, despite the fact that Portuguese discovery and expansion in the Atlantic had been under way for some sixty years before Columbus’ first voyage, for most Americanists the early modem history of America seems to begin, without more than a glancing backward look, in 1492. It is true that the facts make it impossible to ignore the Portuguese dimension entirely. There was, for example, the question of whether Castile had any legal right to sponsor exploration in the western Atlantic, let alone to claim sovereignty over territories discovered there. The Treaty of AlcScovas (1479) allocated the Canary Islands to Castile but specifically excluded the Castilians from Guinea, the Portuguese Atlantic islands (including the Azores) and, by implication, the sea routes to all these destinations. Thii would provide the Portuguese negotiators in 1493 with grounds for arguing that any Castilian ships sailing south and west of the Canaries necessarily infringed Portuguese space as defined by the treaty. ’ Columbus’ own throwaway observations quite often contain reminders, too, that he learnt much of his trade as navigator and explorer under Por- tuguese auspices. But Americanists usually do not see any need to con- cern themselves in any depth with the extent to which Portuguese models dictated, influenced or ran parallel to the early processes of discovery and conquest in the New World of America.

Nationalistic prejudice on both sides of the old Tordesillas line has, too, from the fifteenth century onwards, befuddled objective discussion of the topic. Thus the royal chronicler of John I1 of Portugal, Ruy de h a , took a prominent part in the difficult diplomatic discussions between Spain, Portugal and the papacy which immediately followed the completion of the iirst voyage. H e must also, as the Portuguese king’s secretary, have known Columbus personally. Nevertheless, in his chronicle

‘ This was. indeed. the firs position taken up by the Portugueac negotiators in B~rcelonr in April and August 1493: s u Elorentino P&z Embid, Lac descu-os en el Atldntico y la nhlidad cprtelhno-- basta el tratado dc Tmdcsillas (Seville. 1948). 236-9.

@ 1992 The Society for RmaiElcnrce Studies, Oxford Univanity Rczc

378 P. E. Russell

he disposes of the admiral, the Discovery and the immediate diplomatic and political consequences of the latter in three short pages, though find- ing mom to include in them the observation that Columbus always lied about his affairs.’ Pina’s treatment of the events of 1492 reflects, of course, Portuguese embarrassment in his time over the fact that their king, John 11, given a chance in 1484 to underwrite the enterprise of the Indies for Portugal, had turned Columbus down. Though less overtly, Portuguese discomfort about America can also be detected in the mili- tantly hyperbolical way sixteenth-century writers went about the task of writing up the remarkable achievements of Portuguese explorers and navigators in Africa and Asia. ‘ It is difficult not to suspect that one of the motives behind the over-loud tone of such writings was a fear lest, in Europe generally, the epic exploits of the Portuguese overseas might be overshadowed by the publicity accorded to America and to events taking place there. In the present study I shall attempt to draw attention to some of the ways in which Portuguese models seem to have been, or may have been, of more than anecdotal importance in the early stages, at least, of Spanish contacts with the New World.

There is, in fact, strong evidence that, at the time of the discovery of America, the Catholic Monarchs at first viewed their involvement there as simply duplicating in the western Atlwxic what the Portuguese crown had, with papal authority, long been about in the African Atlantic. Thus, for a first example of the influence of Portuguese models on the discovery and conquest of America, we need look no further than the famous papal bull Inter cueteru of 3 May 1493 in which Alexander VI, exercising his spiritual and temporal apostolic authority, granted full sovereignty to the Catholic Monarchs and their successors both over all the new lands in the West (per purtes occidentales ut dicitur versw Indos) so far found by Columbus and over those which might be discovered in the future.‘ So far so good. But then the bull takes a wholly unexpected turn. It proceeds to refer directly to the monopoly over navigation and trade in the African Atlantic first conceded to the Portuguese in explicit terms by Nicholas V in the bull Romanus pontfex of 8 January 1455 and subsequently several times confirmed.’ It is no part of my intentions in

Rui de Pina, C-a dc el-rci D. / d o II, ed. Albert0 Martins de Carvalho (Coimbra. 1950). 184-6. JoZo de Barros gives a fuller account of Columbus first voyage and of the negotiations which led to the Treaty of Tordesillas but he is no laa dismissive of Columbus’s personality than Rui de Fba: JoSo de Bums. Ask primsir0 dicadu, ed. Antdnio Baio. 4th edn (Coimbra. 1932). 111-15.

’ For examples see J. S. da Silva Dias. Influencia & los dcscubsimimtos a la uida cultural dcl &lo XVI (Mexico, 1986). 15-21. This work is a Spanish translation of the same author’s 0 s dcscobrimmtos c a problenuitica cultural do siculo XVI (Coibra. 1973). ‘ Inter cactcra and u s o c i a d bulls arc printed in a handy fonn in Dcscob+immtos portugucscs,

ed. Jo50 Martins da Sdva Marques. 111 (1461-1500) (Lisbon, 1971). nos. 2534 . pp. 374-80 - title hereinafter referred to by the abbreviation DP. There arc TWO bulk known as Inter cactera, one issued on 3 May, the other on 4 May. I refer here to the first one.

’ The best t a t of Romanus patifcx now is that in Monummta HmritinCr. ed. Ant6nio Joaquim Dias Dinis. O.F.M.. XII (1454-6) (Coimbra. 1971). no. 36. pp. 71-9. In further references in thi ar-

Some Portuguese paradigmr 379 the present study to enter into a discussion of the tangled and controver- sial history of the diplomatic events involving Castile, Portugal and the Curia that took place after Columbus' return to Spain in 1493. As is well known, John I1 and his representatives immediately set about an exercise in damage limitation while, for their part, the Catholic Monarchs determined not to allow Portuguese legal arguments to stand in the way of their claims to the lands discovered by Columbus. However, the passage in Inter caetera referred to above does bear directly on my present purpose and therefore deserves to be quoted here in full. It reads

Et quia etiam nonnulli Portugallie R e p in partibus Affrice Guinee et Minere auri ac alias insulas similiter etiam ex concessione apostolica eis faaa repperierunt et acquisiuerunt et per sedem apostolicam eis diuer- sa priuilegia gratie libertates immunitates exemptiones et indulta con- cessa fuerunt / Nos uobis [Ferdinand and Isabella] ac heredibus et successoribus uestris predictis ut in Insulis et terris per urn repertis et reperiendis huiusmodi omnibus et singulis gratiis priuilegis exemp- tionibus libertatibus facultatibus immunitatibus et indultis huiusmodi quorum omnium tenores ac si de uerbo ad uerbum presentibus in- sererentur haberi uolumus pro suffcienter expressi et insertis uti potiri et gaudere libere et licite possitis ac debeatis in omnibus et per omnia perinde ac s i uobis et heredibus et successoribus predictis specialiter concesse fuissent . . .6

The linkage between the maritime expansion of both Spain and Por- tugal could hardly be more explicit than it is in this passage. The Catholic Monarchs and their successors are to enjoy, in the New World, all the privileges of whatever kind that the papacy had granted to the Por- tuguese crown in Guinea.' A much shortened version of Inter caetera, also issued on 3 May -Eminiae devotionis - seems to have been drawn up for the specific purpose of reinforcing this point in a separate document.*

Two questions suggest themselves. Why is there no precise reference in Inter caetera or in Emmabe devotionis to Romanus jxmtqex or to one of the later bulls reconfirming this document? Why, too, did the Curia, an organization hardly short of scribes, not include verbatim in these two all- important bulls full details of the monopolistic rights in the Atlantic granted by the papacy to the Portuguese crown once it had been agreed that these should be regarded as an integral part of the grant to the Catholic Monarchs? One explanation could be that the inclusion of the passage concerned was a last-minute afterthought introduced by the

tide to any of the fifteen volumes of Monummto Hcnn'cha the abbreviation MH with the volume number will be used. ' DP. Ut, 376. line 21-30. ' Guinea, in the terminology of the times, meant the whole of western Africa from the southan

' DP, iu, no. 255. pp. 380-2. frontier of Morocro as far south as the African continent might be found to run.

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Curia itself as a backhanded way of including in the bull an assurance that the Portuguese monopoly in the African Atlantic was in no way questioned by the grant now made to Ferdinand and Isabella. Its location late in the text makes it unlikely that it had formed part of the Catholic Monarchs’ original petition. The Portuguese negotiators in Rome, for their part, can have had no interest in making sure that all the powers granted to the Portuguese crown in the African Atlantic were also en- joyed by the Spanish crown in America. But this way of proceeding may equally well have been adopted, as Anthony Pagden has pointed out, for another and, for the future of the Indians, more ominous purpose. The Bull Romanas pontgex had specifically confirmed to the Portuguese crown in 1455 the right to reduce to perpetual slavery (in perpetturn 5enu’tutem) the persons and dominions of Saracens and pagans wherever these were to be found.’ The Portuguese interpreted ‘perpetual’ as meaning that, even after conversion, a slave remained a slave. A similar authority to the Catholic Monarchs to enslave the Indians in perpetuity was thus included among the unspecified ‘Portuguese’ privileges extended to them in 1493. As is well known, Columbus and his successors did, indeed, ship enslaved Indians to Spain with the same insouciance as African slaves had long been shipped from Guinea to Portugal. Las Casas regarded this un-Christian behaviour as a particularly disastrous example of the influence of Portuguese models on the admiral.” As events were eventually to show, papal concession or no, the enslavement of the In- dians would turn out to be a highly contentious matter in Castile, though in Portugal, the enslavement of Africans was not called into question by any Portuguese writer until the middle of the sixteenth century.” The Portuguese crown was and continued to be entirely unresponsive to such criticisms.

Unlike their Portuguese colleagues, Spanish jurists and theologians were unenthusiastic about the claims of the papalists that the pope had the authority to act as a supreme temporal ruler of the world (dominus wbiS et orbis) or that this authority extended over pagans as well as Chris- tians. However, ten years would pass before a challenge to the propriety of seeking papal authority for Spanish claims to America or for enslav- ing the Indians would be heard in Spain. In the meantime, as Pagden puts it, ‘the Castilian crown followed, undisturbed, in the wake of the Portuguese’. ’ ’ MH, XII, no. 36. p. 75.

I’ The enslavement of Africans in Guinea by the Ponugu*ie was, of course. d d b e d and de- nounced at length by Las Casv in the early part of the HIjtonb de lac Indip . Las Casv plainly concluded that Columbus had first learnt to accept slavery as a result of his contact with the institution in Portugal. Sec, for example, Bartolorn6 de las Casaa, H&miCr de lac In&, ed. A p f n Millarcs Carlo, 2nd edn, I (Mexico and Bucnos Aircs. 1965). 1434 and 233.

I ‘ A. C. and C. M. Saunders. A Social Histosy of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal,

I’ Anthony Pagden. The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge, 1982). 29-30. 1441-1555 (CambridE. 1982). 4 2 4 .

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Inter caetera also inevitably follows Portuguese precedents in other ways simply because of the restricted grounds on which papal donations of this kind could be made. A principal task of the papacy, the document routinely explains in the preamble, was to seek to spread the Faith so that ‘ac barbaras nationes deprimantur et ad fidem ipsam reducantur’. A brief resum4 of Columbus’ account of the American Indians as they had been observed during the first voyage had been incorporated into the Spanish petition. This was evidently put there to assure the Curia that, unlike the case of Guinea, the conversion of the Indians to Christianity would not be difficult. In connection with this commitment a specific instruction is contained in Inter caetera which is not to be found in the bulls granted to the Portuguese crown. Ferdinand and Isabella, to make sure that there was no backsliding with regard to their assurances to the pope that their principal object in taking possession of the new lands was to achieve the conversion of all their inhabitants to Christianity, were directed by Alexander VI to send trustworthy, God-fearing, learned and experienced men to the Indies ‘ad Instruendum Incolas et habitantes prefatos in fide Catholica et bonis moribus imbuendum . . . ’ . I 3 It is possible that this instruction was a backhanded rebuke to the Portuguese, whose failure over decades to get competent missionaries to go to Guinea or to contrive, at least before the 1480% to bring about the permanent conversion of any of the region’s inhabitants had not gone unnoticed.

Finally it is to be observed that Inter caeteru established a Spanish monopoly, directly modelled on the Portuguese one, over navigation and trade with the Indies. No one, on pain of excommunication, the bull declared, might go to the newly discovered lands in the West, or to those which in future might be discovered there, without a special licence from the Catholic Monarchs or their successors. It is important to note at this point that Ferdinand, and more particularly Isabella, already had had experience of sponsoring and controlling navigation and trade to pagan lands in the Atlantic under monopoly conditions. Between 1475 and 1480, during the war between Castile and Portugal, Castilian ships had frequently sailed to Guinea to trade, particularly in gold, pepper and slaves, in defiance of the Portuguese monopoly. Since it was necessary in time of war for the crown to control strictly the movement of vessels in- fringing the monopoly no Castilian ship was then allowed to sai l without a royal licence which authorized the journey, defined the region of Guinea for which the licence was valid and named the cargoes penmitted to be carried on the return journey. The form of the Castilian licence and the steps taken to see that its provkions were followed during a vessel’s journey were directly modelled on tho* that Henry the Navigator had originally imposed in Portugal to protect his Guinea monopoly.

I’ DP, no. 253, p. 376, lines 15-16.

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Columbus' account of the first voyage in particular, as well as sundry annotations in his books, reveal how much he relied in the beginning on what he had learnt in Portugal or by sailing under Portuguese auspices. Thus we have his own word for it that he had more than once sailed under the Portuguese flag to the castle of S5o Jorge da Mina (the Elmina Castle of modem Ghana) constructed in 1482. This was, by then, the main centre of the Portuguese West African gold trade. Though it is unlikely that Siio Jorge was yet producing in the 1480s bullion worth the 120,000 ducats annually which some sources record for the early years of the next century, the whole atmosphere of the castle, which lived for and by the gold trade of Mina, was certainly calculated to stir in Columbus the quasi-mystical feelings that gold seems to have aroused in his mind. '' If he made a journey to S5o Jorge aboard one of the royal caravels regularly engaged in the transport of Mina gold to Portugal, this .experience would have given him first-hand acquaintance with the more mundane aspects of a trade which later so much occupied his thoughts in America. There is no evidence, however, that the Portuguese associated the precious metal with the transcendental qualities that Columbus attached to it.

According to Las Casas, Columbus made the journey from Lisbon to Guinea many times, a statement which is confirmed by one of the marginal notes in his copy of Pierre d'Ailly's Imago mundi. Sights he comes across in the Caribbean on occasion cause him to make com- parisons with similar spectacles he had seen in Guinea, as when he com- pares the disappointingly ugly 'sirens' (manatees) he saw in the sea off Hispaniola with others he had seen while sailing off the Malagueta Coast of Guinea. He correctly notes, too, that the [royal] palm trees to be seen in the Caribbean were a different species of palm from those of Guinea. His frequent use of the Portuguese term ulmudia (from the Arabic) for any sort of dug-out canoe in preference to the Amerindian-derived canoa he sometimes also employs for these craft is another reminder that he had had his first experiences of a tropical pagan world in Guinea. It was probably also in imitation of Portugese practice in Guinea that he took with him on his first voyage the kind of cheap trinkets he offered to the Amerindians and which, while they turned out to be welcomed by the latter, seem hardly appropriate gifts to be carried by an explorer expecting to make contact with the rulers and civilizations of Japan and mainland Asia as these were known about in fifteenth-century Europe. There was also the problem of leaving behind in the various places visited in

I' Las Caw. I, 34. For the gold exports from Mina see Vitonno MagalhZes-Godinho. L'bnomie de I'empirc pormgais aux XVe a XVIe sikler, Ecole Ratique d a Hautes Etudes - VIe Section (Paris, 1969). 213. Also still usefd is J. LlEcio de AzeveQ, Epocas dc Portugal econdmico. 3rd edn (Lisbon. 1973). 168-70.

I 5 Christopher Columbus, Jowrurl o f f h e Firsf Voyage, ed. and trans. B. W. Ife (Warminster. 1990). 187.

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America evidence that the Spaniards had been there. In his diary entry for 12 December 1492 Columbus records that, on a high point above the entrance to a harbour on newly discovered Hispaniola he set up a great cross, 'as a sign that Your Highnesses hold the land as your own and prin- cipally as a sign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and in honour of Ch"stendom'.''j This method of leaving behind a visual record of the Europeans' passage was that used by the Portuguese in Guinea from Prince Henry's time. Only in the reign of John I1 did they sometimes replace the perishable wooden crosses by the tall stone pillars (jxtdr6e.s) brought from Portugal already carved with the royal arms and some other information. It is safe to conclude that, when he set up his cross on Hispaniola, here, too, Columbus was consciously imitating a practice of the Portuguese explorers.

His visits to Guinea had also given him chances both to cornea existing navigational data by his own observations and to test and sometimes to re- ject cosmopphical theories and information put forward by authorities like Pierre d'Ailly and There seems to be no good reason to doubt, either, that his belief that Asia was not too far to the west was strengthened by the exotic flora, unknown in Europe or West Africa, sometimes cast up by the sea on the shores of the Portuguese Atlantic islands which he had seen there with his own eyes or heard about."

Columbus' experiences of sailing to and from Guinea, his sight of what the tropics and the tropical landscape were like, his contact with the pagan peoples of the region and his experience of how trade was con- ducted with them equipped him with the background of seamanship and experience he needed to put flesh on his dreams. The long north-westem sweep from the Mina Coast out into the Atlantic as far as the latitude of the Azores in order to pick up there the Westerlies that would carry the caravels home to Portugal (the wZta de Gutire' of the Portuguese sailing manuals) gave him experience of sailing for long periods far away from any land. It was an experience probably shared with some of the crew members who accompanied him on the first voyage for, during the war between Portugal and Castile that ended twelve years before, it was particularly from the ports of the Guadalquivir estuary that the caravels which had broken the Portuguese Guinea monopoly during that war had come." Among the explorer's lore he explains he had learnt from the Portuguese was, too, the importance of keeping a close watch on any

I' Ibid. 143. I' See, for example. the d d o n of Columbus' marginal notes and other jottings printed in Rac-

colta didocumentie studi@bblicoti dclh Reale Commirdonc ColombioM, ed. C . de Lollii et d, pt 1, -1. 11 (Rome, 1894). 292. 369, 375, 376-7; the point is h W N l y examined in Felip Fern*-Anneao, Columbus (Oxford and New York, 1991), aped. l ly pp. 2 3 4 .

I' See Samuel Eliot Morison. Chrirt@hn Columbus, AdmimCof the Ocean Sea (London. "4). 60-1.

I' An examination of c a s t i documentary and other sources concerning the cpstiliiln mpritkne hervention in Guinea will be found in P. E. R d , 'Fontes documcntais caacelhznas para a hiadria

384 P. E. Russell

birds which might be seen flying while a ship was out of sight of land. Most of the Atlantic islands that they had discovered and now ruled had, he comments, been discovered by watching the flight of birds."

It should be remembered, too, that Columbus, when he resided in mainland Portugal and in Port0 Santo and Madeira, had become entirely familiar with a society in which black slaves were a normal feature of the social scene. On his return journeys from Guinea the caravels on which he journgred certainly, as was the rule, would have carried newly purchased slaves in their holds. His own remarks and behaviour and his readiness to supply the Spanish kingdoms with Indian slaves may therefore be seen as yet another example of the way he sought to adapt Portuguese models to American possibilities."

One of the most important pieces of knowledge that Columbus took from Portugal to America was his first-hand experience of how the Por- tuguese dealt with the problem of communicating with indigenous, newly discovered populations whose languages were, by definition, incom- prehensible to the discoverers. It had long been realized by European explorers in Guinea that, unless they could overcome the language barrier, little useful could be achieved. The point is clearly made by the Venetian explorer C2 da Mosto when he writes about the reasons which led him to abandon further exploration beyond Senegambia in 1456:

When we saw that we were in a new country and that no one could understand us, we concluded that it would be useless to continue our voyage since we expected we would continuously come across new kinds of speech and, since we would not be able to understand these languages, nothing worthwhile could be achieved."

Columbus discloses his knowledge of the linguistic problems confronting the Portuguese in Guinea when he remarks in the Joumul of the First Voyage that the islanders of the Caribbean all understand each other 'which is not the case in Guinea where there are a thousand different language^'.^^ In the same passage he refers directly to the systematic reliance of the Portuguese on kidnapped natives whom they trained to act as interpreters whenever they reached a new linguistic area. The regimentos or sailing orders carried by every Portuguese caravel on a voyage of exploration instructed the ship's commander, on such occasions, to seize a few people there for th is purpose. These were brought to

da uppnsio portugucsa na Guin6 nos 6liltimos anos de D. Afonso V', Do T a p 0 e da Hist&, 4

*' 'sabia el Almirante que las mls de las yslas que tienen los Portugueses. por las avcs las (1971), 209-21.

descubricron' (Columbus, Journal, 24). *' F e d - - h - 0 , C o l ~ b ~ , 68, 101, 107, 111 a d 142. I * Translated from Le novigarioniatlantiche del venedmro Alvise da Masto, ed. Tullia Gasparrini

*' Columbus, Journal. 79. Leporan. Il Nuovo Ramusio, V (Rome, 1966). 113.

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Portugal, taught some Portuguese and then interrogated about their country. After this they would be sent back there aboard the caravels when it was wished to establish trade with the newly discovered region or to enter into political relations with it. This, though, was by no means the only function the Portuguese called on native interpreters to perform. Caravels going to one of the old-established trading posts (resgates) also regularly carried an African interpreter who was expert in the particular local language spoken there. The peculiar feature of the Portuguese system. described in some detail in C& da Mosto's Nav@zz*oni, was that these interpreters were nearly always slaves, some belonging to the crown but many to private masters. '' It is to be presumed that a main reason for maintaining the slave status of interpreters was that they could then be compelled to undertake this role whether they wished to or not. As Ca da Most0 explains, the interpreter's task in Guinea could be a very dangerous one. He or she - women interpreters were frequently employed - was liable to be killed by his fellows when he landed because they saw him as a betrayer of his own people or because they suspected anyone who seemed to be serving the Europeans by undermining the language barrier which gave the Africans some sense of security against them. There was, too, always the possibility that the slave-interpreter would, for his part, as Columbus noted, seize the chance to escape from his Portuguese captors, an act which not only meant the loss of a valuable slave but also a waste of the efforts which had gone into training him or her to speak Portuguese. There are some signs that, in the decades after Prince Henry's death, the Portuguese had come to realize that the custom of routinely treating all interpreters as slaves had its disadvantages, though the practice of seizing by force men and women intended to be used for this purpose continued unabated."

Columbus, once more following Portuguese practice, regularly kidnapped young men on newly discovered islands so that they could, as he says, be brought back to Spain, taught some Spanish and used as interpreters as well as sources of information about the lands from which they came.26 The admiral, though, did not always follow Portuguese usage to the let- ter. He introduced some innovations designed, he says, to avoid certain weaknesses he had observed in the Portuguese system. Thus, after ex- plaining that he had kidnapped five youths from a canoe with a view to taking them back to Spain, he goes on:

" Naw@abni, 7 7 6 and 125-6. See also the EngIish translation of CP da Mosto's book The Vqycylas of Cadamosto, trans. and ed. C. R. Crone. Hakluyt Society, Second Seria no. LXXX (Lon- don, 1957). 55-6 and 84. " In his account of Pedro de Sintra's voyage of discowry to modern Liberia in 1462, C2 da Mmo

notes that a native of that region seized by Afonso V's orders to give information about his land was eventually sent back there by the king with a gift of clothes as an act of charity (N~w&zkmi, 125-6;Thr Voyoghc, 84). '' Columbus, J o d , 79.

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Later I sent to a house on the western side of the river and they brought back seven women, young and adult, and three children. I did this 50

that the men would behave themselves better in Spain with their own women than without them, because on many other occasions men have been brought from Guinea to learn the language in Portugal and when they were returned and it was thought that some advantage might be gained from them in their own land in consideration for the good treatment they had received and the presents they had been given, once they amved on land they never appeared again . . . If they have their women they will be more willing to provide the cooperation expected of them and these women will also do much to teach our men their language.*’

The strictly pedagogical relationship imagined by Columbus in the last observation was, perhaps, conditioned by his awareness that the document was eventually intended for Queen Isabella’s eyes. He did, though, attach importance at this stage of the Discovery to the idea that the Spaniards themselves ought, as soon as possible, to learn something of the language of the Indians and he notes with some satisfaction that, when landing at a point on the Cuban coast, some of his crew were already able to tell the local people, in their own language, not to be afraid. They had, he explains, learnt a little of the language from the kidnapped Indians already aboard their ship. *’ This linguistic breakthrough did not have the reassuring effect hoped for since the entire population of the place then fled. Columbus, writing on 27 November 1492, complained to the Catholic Monarchs about the problems the lingustic barrier between himself and the Indians caused him and announced his intention to learn their language and to teach it to members of his household.29 A number of enmes in Journal show that he did at least learn the meaning of a number of Indian words. There is evidence to suggest that, by his time, the Portuguese, too, had begun to interest themselves in the native names for things used in some regions of Guinea.

So far this paper has confined itself to the direct influence of Por- tuguese models on the way the first Spanish contacts with America were made and subsequently developed. I wish, in conclusion, to draw attention to what seems to be a Portuguese precedent for the debates which took place in Spain from the beginning of the sixteenth century about the right of the Spanish crown to enslave the Indians. As is well known, these debates developed rapidly into arguments, associated particularly with the name of the theologian Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1485-1546), about the legitimacy of the right claimed by the Castilian crown to undertake

I’ Ibid. 79. I‘ Ibid. 99. I’ Ibid. 101.

Some Portuguese p a r a d i p 387

the conquest and enslavement of the pagan peoples of America.” In fact these questions had been raised in the third decade of the previous century in connection with the Portuguese overseas expansion, when Duarte I of Portugal in 1436 seems to have asked Eugenius IV for an authoritative statement of the grounds on which, according both to canon and civil law, it was permissible, with or without papal authority, for a Christian prince to make war on and attempt to conquer Islamic states that had never.been part of his dominions or to occupy, with a view to their forced conversion, the territory of pagan peoples who had never been under Christian rule. The enquiry was motivated by the extreme pressure put upon the king by Prince Henry the Navigator in the mid-1430s (i) to authorize a Portuguese attack on Tangier as a further stage towards the conquest of Morocco and (ii) also to allow the prince to mount another Portuguese expedition to conquer and convert the larger, pagan-held, islands of the Canarian archipelago despite existing Castilian claims there. After 1434, too, the prince had made it known that he intended to explore the unknown coast of Saharan West Africa. There was strong opposition in Portugal to Henry’s expansionist ambitions and it is therefore surmised that the Portuguese king’s approach to the papacy was motivated by an expectation that he would get an unambiguous declara- tion in favour of Henry’s crusading ambitions from the pope together with a statement of the doctrinal grounds on which Henry’s various pro- jects outside Europe could proceed. In fact this did not happen. The Curia invited two professional lawyers attached to it to supply written opinions on the questions raised. They each submitted to the Curia in October 1436 the results of their enormously detailed examination of the recognized authorities on these matters. Both documents conclude that, according to the main weight of authoritative opinion, any attack on Morocco (Barbary) by a Christian prince was only permissible in very restricted circ~mstances.~’ The documents, however, also invited attention to the views of various specialist writers on the general question of

’’ For recent accounts of the history and nature of t h e disputes in sixteenth-century Spain set Pagden, The Full. 27-108 and m’rn and. for a briefer account. the same author’s introduction to Francisco de Vitona. Poldical Writings. ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrancc. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge. 1991). ” The consdurn of Antonio Minuca da Pratovecdrio is printed in UH. V, no. 140, pp. 285-320

and that of Antonio de Roselli in ibid. no. 141, pp. 32045. For comments on these documents and their interpretation see particularly Charles-Martial de Witte, ‘b bull- pontificales et l’expansion portugaise au XVe SiWe’, Rev H& E c c k . 48 (1953), Ppuim; Ant6nio Domingues de S o w Costa, 0 h f m a D. Henriqw na Cxponrio portuguesa (Brag?, 1960) and the same author’s ‘0 factor nligim. razz0 jurfdica dar descobrimentos portugueses’, Congrego Intcrnacional de Hist6na dos kobrimcntos, Actas, IV, (Lisbon, 1961). 99-138 which analyses in greater detail this material; P. E. Rusxll. ‘El descubrimiento de Canarias y el debate medieval accrca de 10s d m h o s de 10s prin- apes y pueblos paganas’. Rm H& Canad. 36 (1978). 9-32. Jama Muldoon, Popas, L0wy.n and Infidels (Liverpool. 1979) discuyes the opinions of the two jurists on pp. 124ff. Dr J. N. H. Lawrance has also kindly let me sn a paper of his soon to go to p r t s entitled ‘Alonso de Cartagcna and the “Af- fair of the Canaries”: a note on political thought in fifteenth-century Spain’.

3aa P. E. Russell

papal authority. The discussion of these went beyond the particular question of what rights, if any, the Portuguese crown had in terms of civil and canon law to try to conquer Morocco. The two jurists thus examined the legitimacy of any attempt by a Christian prince, with or without papal authority, to make a just war on infidels and pagans in general. Some of their points, by no means original in terms of the argurnents of late medieval publicists, sound familiar to students of the early sixteenth- century Spanish debates about the rights of Spain in America. Thus one of the jurists, Minuca da Ratovecchio, quotes Innocent IV to the effect that ‘dominia possessiones et iurisdictiones Kate sunt apud infideles, nam hec non tantum pro fidelibus sed pro omni ration& creatura facta sunt . . :32

Actually Minucci’s connrltum was not as damaging to the crusading c a w as might be supposed from the number of restrictive limitations cited by him since he also listed a number of grounds on which, despite the general rule referred to above, the pope could authorize Christian princes to make war on Saracens, infidels and barbarians.

The cOILSiliUm of the second jurist, Antonio de Roselli, followed broadly similar lines to that of Minucci. Roselli concluded that , according to both divine law and natural law unbelievers could exercise legitimate sovereignty: ‘probatur iure gemtium, juncto cum iure diuino, quod tali regi aut baronj [christianis] non liceat paganos in suis dominijs vel iuribus inquiet are’. 33

He gave it as his opinion that pagans have an absolute right to govern themselves and that, even on the pretext of converting them to Christi- anity or making them better people (ut efficiaur rneliores), no pope, emperor or king can authorize or make war on them.)‘ Like Minucci, however, Roselli found situations which, nevertheless, did pennit Chris- tian rulers to invade and occupy pagan lands - for example, in the case of a refusal by infidel or pagan rulers to admit Christian missionaries to their countries or to allow the free celebration of Mass there.35

What is abundantly clear is that the c d u of the two jurists, duly presented to the Curia, in no way deterred EugeniuS IV or his successors from authorizing and encouraging Portuguese overseas expansion. At a time when the traditional claims of the papacy that the pope was ve7u.s impmutor mundi in a temporal as well as a spiritual sense had been seriously eroded by the arguments of many scholars, the unconditional Portuguese readiness to accept the ‘papalist’ position was naturally seen by Eugenius IV as timely support for the view that his temporal power was universal and that pagans and infidels had no rights at all after Christ’s

” MH. v. 301. ” Ibid. v. 527. ’‘ Ibid. v, 529. ia Ibid. v. 339.

!Some Portuguese parad@ns 389

coming, a view often associated in particular with the name of Henricus de Segusio (Ho~tiensis).~~

It has recently been suggested that the two cow1z.k probably did not reach the Portuguese king but should be regarded as mere academic exer- cises by the two jut;sts which had nothing in particular to do with Por- tugal. This suggestion seems difficult to sustain as it attributes lack of significance to a considerable number of coincidences involving these documents. Both, duly sealed by their authors, were placed in the Vatican archives as were, over the centuries, thousands of similar conrilia on a great many different topic^.^' Immediately preceding them in the register concerned is a petition of Duarte I asking Eugenius IV to give papal approval to Henry the Navigator's plan to seize by force the pagan- held islands in the Canaries (ut primum eos ipsos paganos adfidem Chris- thnam et deuoa'onem corone Portugale conuertbset), a coincidence that is hardly likely to be f~rtuitous.~' It is true that, as one would expect in the case of an enquiry concerning general principles of civil and canon law, no precise reference to Portugal appears in either c o w 1 k n but the two jurists, invited, as they explain, to consider the case of 'quidam princeps siue rex catolicus non recognocens superiorem vult inducere bellum contra saracenos . . . in Barbaria', could hardly fail to realize that the ruler concerned was the King of Portugal, a country which had long declared itself to be a papal fief and whose kings, in consequence, did not recognize the temporal authority of the Emperor. The reference to Barbary (Morocco) must, anyway, have clinched the point because Por- tuguese aggressive intentions there were known in 1436 to all those attend- ing the Council of

Also to be taken into account is the attention given to Duane's contacts with the Curia at this time by the royal chronicler, Rui de Pina. Rui de Pina records at some length that, after the king had already given his as- sent to the ill-fated Tangiers expedition, he received a discouraging reply from the Curia to his enquiry concerning the legitimacy of such a venture. The reply, says the chronicler, much disconcerted the king because of the unexpected limitations Eugenius IV's advisers placed on the right of a Christian prince to make, or the pope to authorize, war on infid&.'O At all events, whether the Portuguese king or Prince Henry actually read

3' The views of HrnricuS de Segusio were expliatly rejected by Rosefli (ibid. V. 340). The former claimed that, after the advent of Christ, neither ptiles nor pagans retained any secular dominiurn or jurisdiction anywhere (hoe dormiuirmfual et at in chrktabnos tmnslatum). '' See Walter Ullmann. Low and Po&icc ah the Middle Ages, The Sources of History, Studies in

I' M€I, V. no. 129, pp. 251-8. the USW of Historical Evidence (Cambridge. 1975). 115-16.

. )' The Portuguese court at this time was in close touch with the Curia and the promdings of the Council of Bade thanks to its continuous contam with Dom Gomes F&. the Portuguese abbot of the Rorentina Badia. who was then an influential figure in church affairs in Italy. " See Rui de Pina, Cr6nicas: D. Ducrrle. rev. M. Lopes de Almeida. Tcsourw da Litaatura e da

Hist6ria (Oporto, 1977). 535-7.

390 P. E. Russell

the two c m l t a or not, it is clear that neither, in 1436 or later, paid any attention to the unwelcome rulings then coming out of the Curia. Like the Catholic Monarchs in 1493, their political purposes were better served by choosing to follow, despite the doubts of jurists and conciliarists, the older, uncomplicated crusading doctrine which ascribed to the pope the right to dispose of infidel and pagan peoples as he pleased. For my present purposes the significance of the opinions submitted by Minuca and Roselli is not on account of any influence they might have had on events but because they serve to remind us that there was nothing new about the basic doctrinal arguments which, a century or so later and with far greater skill and impact, were brought into play in Spain when the legitimacy of the Spanish crown’s actions and policy in America was questioned.

The importance of Portuguese models as an influence on the Spanish discovery and conquest of America did not outlast, at least in the awareness of those immediately involved, the lifetime of the Catholic Monarchs and of Columbus himself. Ferdinand and Isabella. like the admiral, were conditioned by their historical and personal experiences to think at first of the whole American venture in terms of an existing frame of reference established by the Portuguese. For Ferdinand and Isabella it seemed at the beginning as yet another fight in the long history of the rivalry between Castile and Portugal which they were determined to win. Their conviction after Columbus’ first voyage that John I1 would lose no time in dispatching ships to follow the admiral’s route to the New World points to the confrontational response the Portuguese were expected to make when the news of the admiral’s success reached them. So do Colum- bus own fears about what would happen to him when he was forced by storms, at the end of that voyage, to put into a harbour in the Azores and later to seek shelter in Lisbon itself. With the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas, however, all this was changed. Spain now had, as far as inter- national relations were concerned, what seemed for the moment to be an undisputed title to the Indies. Spaniards rapidly came to think of the whole enterprise as having been, from the beginning. an entirely Spanish affair. The part played by Portuguese models and practices was soon forgotten. All the same, it seems beyond question that, without Portugal, Columbus would never have been in a position to discover (or rediscover) America for Spain.

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some portuguese paradigms for the discovery and conquest of spanish america

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