"Spain in America" by Charles Gibson Harper & Row Publishers Keystone Industrial Park Scranton, PA 18512 Chapter I: Spain and the New World For the origins of Spanish colonization in America we must turn back to the late medieval world of the Mediterranean, particularly to the kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula, where Christian armies had progressively recovered lands from the Moslems, and to the coasts of Africa, where the Italian cities still held the lead in exploration and trade. Venice maintained a hold upon Egyptian commerce, receiving goods from India and the Spice Islands. Genoese mariners in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries undertook occasional ventures of great daring, probably including sea journeys off the western shore of Africa to the Azores and Madeira Islands, and possibly including a circumnavigation of the great southern continent. Techniques of seafaring and cartography were well advanced by the end of the fourteenth century (both the compass and the astrolabe were already in use), but voyages in the Atlantic Ocean westward and southward from the Straits of Gibraltar still entailed many practical difficulties. The world outside the Mediterranean continued to be identified with regions of mystery where ancient lore had postulated Atlantis and where medieval lore postulated a limit to the finite earth and the first frontiers of Paradise. Dominating the fifteenth-century expansion toward the south was the celebrated Prince Henry of Portugal. It was Prince Henry who was most responsible for shifting the focus of internal European maritime activity from Italy to the Iberian peninsula. It was Henry who mounted the Portuguese maritime attack (1415) upon the fortified Moslem city of Cueta in the first act of state-directed imperialism of modern European history. Collect- ing, in so far as he was able, the records of earlier Asiatic and African adventures, Henry further undertook to extend Portuguese activity along the Atlantic coast of Africa. In his character and outlook he embodied a medley of motivations derived from the medieval heritage and from the contingencies of his own epoch, motivations in which nationalistic, Christian, commercial, scientific, and military purposes were united in a common effort. It is doubtful that the establishment of a sea route to India played any major role in his original design. He expressed rather a continuation of the warfare of Christians and Moors, a curiosity and eagerness for geographical discovery, and a desire to capitalize upon the trade routes of the African interior. His project for establishing contact with the supposed Christian kingdom of Prester John, and thus for surrounding Moorish Africa with Christian armies, was in the full spirit of the war against the Mohammedan invaders of the Iberian peninsula. In all, Portuguese expansion was his principal occupation and objective, and he devoted himself to this with rare singleness of purpose. Henry transformed the irregular Portuguese voyaging of the fourteenth century into a planned attack upon the imperfectly known geography to the south, and, by implication, upon the whole concept of a limited European world. At the time of his death in 1460, Portuguese maritime enterprise had extended its influence nearly to the equatorial line, a distance of some three thousand miles down the African coast. [Chapter VII of the work by Gomes Eannes de Azurara, the principal contemporary chronicler and authority on Prince Henry, the "Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea," C. Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage, trans. (2 vols., London, 1896-99), is an analysis of the motives that impelled him to send out his expeditions. Azurara lists five: curiosity for knowledge, commercial opportunities, the need to discover the extent of Moorish power, the search for a Christian king with whom an alliance could be made, and the expansion of the faith. Azurara adds that all derive from one main cause, "the inclination of the heavenly wheels." For modern interpretations of Henry's motives, the two statements of Beazley have not been improved upon: "Prince Henry of Portugal and the African Crusade of the Fifteenth Century," "American Historical Review," XVI (1910-11), 11-23, and "Prince Henry of Portugal and his Political, Commercial, and Colonizing Work," "American Historical Review," (1911-12), 252-267. For a strong statement of economic motivation, see Earl J. Hamilton, "The Role of Monopoly in the Overseas Expansion and Colonial Trade of Europe Before 1800," "American Economic Review," XXXVIII (1948), 35- 36.] Delays in the rate of Portuguese advance after 1460 are attributable partly to the death of the energetic Prince Henry and partly to the need for reinforcing Portuguese control over the regions already discovered. IT is true that a spectacular series of voyages under Fernao Gomes substantially extended the known coast of Africa in a brief five-year period in the early 1470's; but the royal agreement with Gomes was permitted to expire, and the characteristic activity of the Portuguese for two decades after 1460 lay in the exploitation of the economic wealth of Africa, principally slaves, ivory, and gold. Only under John II, who succeeded to the Portuguese throne in 1481, did there appear a renewed impetus for systematic large-scale enterprises in the manner of Prince Henry. The voyages of the 1480's brought the Portuguese to the Congo River and finally, in the expedition of Bartholomew Diaz, to the Great Fish River, beyond the southern tip of Africa on the east coast of the continent. Contem- poraneously an equally successful expedition, in an older tradi- tion, was made by Pedro da Covilha, who journeyed as a merchant to Cairo, Aden, and Calicut on the Malabar coast of India and returned by way of the East African coast. There can be no question of the objective of these later expeditions by land and by sea. The intention of the Portuguese in the late 1480's was to establish direct relations with India, and the immediate prospect and expectation of John II were signified in his re- naming Diaz' Tempestuous Cape near the southern tip of Africa the Cape of Good Hope. [The standard account of these events in English, from Prince Henry to Vasco da Gama, is Edgar Prestage, "The Portuguese Pioneers" (London, 1933), which is generally accurate but which probably claims too much for the Portuguese. For the century following Henry's death, John W. Blake has edited and translated the relevant documents in "Europeans in West Africa, 1450-1560" (2 vols., London, 1942), and has written the historical commentary in "European Beginnings in West Africa, 1454-1578" (London, New York, and Toronto, 1937).] Her prowess in African navigation notwithstanding, Portugal was not to be the leading nation in American affairs. In the late fifteenth century two other kingdoms of the Iberian penin- sula, neighbors and traditional rivals of the Portuguese, were developing into states capable of competing in the overseas world. Castile under Henry IV (1454-74) and Aragon under John II (1458-79) had been occupied in debilitating wars and internal disputes over dynastic titles. Under their successors, Isabella of Castile (1474-1504) and Ferdinand of Aragon (1479-1516), more authoritative and organized political systems came into being in both. After the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469--a teen-age marriage, supported by a forged papal bull and negotiated in spite of opposition from Portugal, France, and the Spanish kingdoms themselves--and after Isabella had established her claim to the throne, the relation between Aragon and Castile became one of deliberate dynastic cohesion. There occurred no reconciliation or unification of institutions between the Spanish monarchies. But the royal union did make possible a final attack (1482-92) upon the emirate of Granada, the "Moorish" state at the southern tip of the peninsula, and this climactic ten-year war served to reinforce still further the royal power. The conquest of Granada may be interpreted as the final phase of the eight- hundred-year Spanish reconquista. It was understood at the time as a fifteenth-century crusade under the leadership of the two monarchs of Aragon and Castile. Ferdinand and Isabella further subdued the Spanish nobility, limited the authority of the towns, brought the military orders under royal control, organized the Inquisition to ensure Christian orthodoxy (Jews and Mohammedans were now forbidden to live in Spain), and enormously increased the royal revenues. By the 1480's a conspicuous transformation in the composition and strength of the Spanish kingdoms was well advanced and peninsular power relations had entered a new stage. [Jean Hippolyte Mariejol, "The Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella," Benjamin Keen, trans. and ed. (New Brunswick, 1961), pp. 115 ff.; J.H. Elliott, "Imperial Spain, 1469-1716" (London, 1963), pp. 5 ff.] Portuguese-Spanish rivalry in overseas activity manifested itself in mutual suspicion and open violence. The Portuguese traffic on the African coast stimulated a series of intrusive raiding actions by Spaniards, who justified their action by the claim that Africa had been a possession of the Visigothic Spanish kings. Confronted with actual and potential Spanish threats in the Atlantic, the Portuguese constructed a series of African coastal fortresses, notably Sao Jorge da Mina (1482), to protect Portuguese interests. The immediate overseas world was formally divided between the two nations in the Treaty of Alcacovas (1479), by which Castile recognized the existing Portuguese possessions and Portugal recognized Spanish dominion over the Canary Islands. [The important parts of this treaty are trans- lated into English in Francis Gardiner Davenport (ed.), "European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648" (Washington, 1917), pp. 42-48; see p. 35 for relevant bibliography.] Spain conquered Gran Canaria and the entire Canary archipelago in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. But the price paid by the Spaniards for the Canaries was a heavy one. At Alcacovas Spain recognized Portuguese possession of the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Madeira Islands, as well as the African coast. Thus in the 1480's Ferdinand and Isabella could boast only a limited number of foreign exploits to rival the great achievements of Diaz, Covilha, and others in the Portuguese service. Ferdinand and Isabella furthermore were occupied with the final attack upon the Moors in southern Spain and were not to feel free to extend the reconquista beyond Spanish borders in any decisive way until 1492. It was in this atmosphere of peninsular rivalry and nation- alistic expansion that Columbus made his appearance on the European and especially on the Iberian scene. Columbus' project, the "enterprise of the Indies," placed its essential stress upon the westward route. The conception was not wholly new, nor was it the chimerical fancy of an impractical imagination, as has sometimes been supposed. It appears to have had the support, as early as the 1470's, of the Florentine geographical scholar Paolo Toscanelli. [Henry Vignaud, "Toscanelli and Columbus: The Letter and Chart of Toscanelli" (New York, 1902), is a skeptical account containing technical information on the famous connection between Columbus and Toscanelli. The English version is an expansion and improvement upon the French.] Numerous voyagers, moreover, were familiar with at least the initial stages of Columbus' proposed route. The standard Portuguese journey to the Guinea coast and in African trade required a first course set in a southwesterly direction toward Brazil. The Portuguese monarchy had made provision for discoveries westward in the Atlantic as early as the 1460's; English sailors were venturing far out from Bristol in the same period; and maps of the fifteenth century charac- teristically showed scattered islands--Antilia, Atlantis, Brazil--in the Atlantic Ocean. The islands were theoretical and their location depended upon the whim of individual carto- graphers, but they testify to a concern for oceanic geography and a confidence in the existence of unknown western lands. [L. Sprague de Camp and Willy Ley, "De la Atlantida a El Dorado" (Barcelona, 1960), is a study of "imaginary geography" and its effect on exploration and discovery.] We may reject at once the belief, still popular in the twentieth century, that Columbus was the first to conceive of a spherical world. Pythagoreans in the fifth century B.C. already knew that the world was round, and though the notion fell some- times into disrepute after this, it was never completely lost from view. Aristotle speculated on the distance from Spain to India by a westward route. Eratosthenes, identifying the Tropic of Cancer by observing the sun's reflection in a well, utilized the postulates of Euclidean geometry to compute the earth's circumference at 250,000 stadia, an error of approximately 15 per cent. This was in the third century B.C., and though Eratosthenes' figure was later disputed as too large, the method and the spherical hypothesis on which it depended always had adherents among learned people. Columbus, a Genoese versed in the literature of travel and with practical experience in navigation, first offered his proposal to John II of Portugal. [The extensive literature arguing for other birthplaces for Columbus is late and unconvinc- ing. Columbus himself said that he was Genoese, and the asser- tion is supported by contemporary testimony which identifies him as from Genoa or near Genoa. See on this subject Samuel E. Morison, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus" (2 vols., Boston, 1942), I, 7 ff.] When the proposal was refused, Columbus moved to the rival Spanish court, arguing his case there and sending his brother Bartholomew to seek the support of Henry VII of England. It should not be supposed that the delays and obstacles he encountered were due to a summary rejection of his project by the monarchies concerned. With the sphericity of the world an accepted hypothesis, the theoretical possibility of a journey to the East by sailing west was not seriously called into question. Instead the feasibility or practicality of Columbus' proposal and the terms demanded by Columbus himself appear to have been the decisive points debated. [Columbus, "a man of noble and lofty ambitions," according to his son Ferdinand, "would not covenant save on such terms as would bring him great honor and advantage." Ferdinand Columbus, "The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus," Benjamin Keen, trans. and ed. (New Brunswick, 1959), p. 35.] Even this, however, may not be asserted unequivocally, nor may Columbus' "enterprise of the Indies" be strictly identified as a proposed journey to the known or fabled East. Columbus was reticent concerning his true intentions, and it was to the interest of each nation to maintain its deliberations in secret. Columbus received from Ferdinand and Isabella a letter to be presented to the Great Khan of the Far East; but the possibility of new territorial discovery in the "Ocean Sea" was expressly allowed for in his contract with the Spanish monarchs (April, 1492), and he was promised political and commercial privileges in whatever new lands he might encounter. [Columbus' powers included the hereditary titles and offices of admiral, viceroy, governor, and captain general. For a summation of the powers and the legal basis of his jurisdiction, see Mario Gongora, "El estado en el derecho indiano, epoca de fundacion (1492-1570)" (Santiago de Chile, 1951), pp. 43-44.] Columbus' course on his first crossing lay toward Spain's single Atlantic colony, the Canary Islands, and thence directly west. Favored by weather, the voyage remained without incident save for strained relations between the admiral and his crew. Land was sighted in the Bahamas approximately a month after the departure from the Canaries. Columbus and his men proceeded to explore along the coasts of the Bahama Islands, Cuba, and Hispaniola (Haiti), and after an accident to one of the three ships Columbus set out on the return journey. He took with him several natives to show to Queen Isabella, leaving about forty of his own followers at La Navidad on the north shore of Hispaniola in the first European settlement planted on the American hemi- sphere since the days of the Norsemen. [Detailed, firsthand data on Columbus' initial voyage are available in Columbus' own journal or log, preserved in an abstract by Bartolome de Las Casas. Christopher Columbus, "The Journal of Christopher Columbus," Cecil Jane and L.A. Vigneras, trans. and ed. (New York, 1960.)] Having made the discovery, Columbus recorded his belief that he had tested and proved the new route to the Far East. He identified the native as Indians, and Cuba as Cipangu (Japan), or the realm of the Great Khan. That he did so attests to the authority, for a sensitive fifteenth-century mind, of that vast body of literary evidence, including travelers' tales and geo- graphical lore, on which much of the fifteenth-century conception of the world was based. Columbus' error lay in underestimating the circumference of the earth in the Ptolemaic tradition (less accurate than the earlier tradition of Erastosthenes), and in overestimating the ratio of land to water on the earth's surface in the tradition of European geographers and travelers to the east. [See the interesting study by George E. Nunn, "The Geographical Conceptions of Columbus: A Critical Consideration of Four Problems" (New York, 1924), pp. 1-30, on Columbus' com- putation of one degree and the result for his idea of the loca- tion of Asia.] By Columbus' computation, which was a reasonable and plausible deduction from false assumptions, the nautical distance from Palos to Cipangu was almost exactly the actual breadth of the Atlantic Ocean. Hence the islands of the West Indies lay in the supposed position of those offshore Asiatic islands with which the geographers of the period so generously sprinkled the region east and southeast of Cathay. Columbus persisted in his conviction despite all empirical evidence to the contrary. In Cuba he authorized his interpreter, Luis de Torres, to enter into negotiations with the Great Khan in a local Arawak village. Portuguese interest lay in a rejection of Columbus' version of the famous voyage. It happened that Columbus, in an accident of weather, was compelled to seek shelter on his homeward journey first in the mouth of the Tagus, near Lisbon, and to notify the Portuguese rather than the Castilian monarch of his exploit. To John II of Portugal, who some nine years before had refused to gamble on his venture, Columbus was able in 1493 to show gold and "Indians," and to announce that he had visited the Far East in the western ocean. The rivalry between Portugal and Spain at once took on a more competitive character. Having now ac- celerated its own program of overseas navigation, Portugal seemed committed to the alternative, circum-Africa route. Some senti- ment existed in the Portuguese court in favor of a forcible prevention of Columbus' return to Spain. But John II chose rather to counteract Columbus' assertions by diplomatic means and in so doing depended on a more accurate estimate of the voyage than Columbus' own. In the official view of the Portuguese king, San Salvador and the other lands visited by Columbus were Atlantic islands bearing neither relation nor resemblance to Asia. Moreover, they lay sufficiently close to Portugal's own possessions in the Atlantic to justify a Portuguese claim in accordance with the terms of Alcacovas. In Spain as in Portugal the report of Columbus' journey was studied with interest. The report lent some popular support to the navigator's Far Eastern assertions, but it was exactly on this point that doubt was cast among the learned and the politi- cally influential. Skepticism was expressed within a few months of Columbus' return, and in their statement to Pope Alexander VI, dispatched promptly after the return of Columbus, the Spanish monarchs avoided reference to the Far Eastern connection, speaking instead of the discovery of distant lands to the west. [Edmundo O'Gorman, "The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History" (Bloomington, 1961), pp. 81 ff.] More practically, they undertook to send a second expedition westward, again under the command of Columbus, for further colonization and exploration. The second voyage was an impressive one in equipment, cargo, personnel, and early prospects. Columbus set sail from Cadiz in September, 1493, with a fleet of seventeen ships. From the Canaries his course lay farther south than on the former occasion and the landfall was made on the island of Dominica in the Lesser Antilles. The party turned northwest to Hispaniola, found the colony destroyed by Indians, and early in 1494 established a second settlement, Isabela, again on the northern shore of Hispaniola. Still searching for indications of India and the empire of the Great Khan, Columbus spent some months in coasting the islands of the Caribbean. Returning to the Isabela colony, he found a state of economic distress and social disorder. His brothers, Diego and Bartholomew, were involved in problems of administrative control. Illness was widespread, and Indian warfare had occupied the colonists for long periods. In the belief that his own and the colony's welfare would be best served by his return to Spain, Columbus set sail again in March, 1496, with several hundred disheartened colonists, a number of Indians, some gold dust, an assortment of artifacts, and the information that he had located Ophir, the source of the gold, almug trees, and precious stones presented to Solomon by the Queen of Sheba. In Spain Columbus secured a renewed expression of his rights and privileges. But the monarchs had already begun to compromise upon the earlier pledges by authorizing other voyages. The admiral's position tended now to be weakened by personal enmities, campaigns of disparagement, and sudden shortages of funds. He experienced difficulties in obtaining colonists for the proposed third voyage. In 1497 he received authority to use prisoners for this purpose, and it was not until 1498 that he was prepared to sail, in a fleet now less than half the size of the fleet of 1493. The party divided at the Canaries, and Columbus with three vessels pursued a course far to the south, landing first at the island of Trinidad and sighting the mouth of the Orinoco River. Proceeding north to Santo Domingo, a new colony on the southern coast of Hispaniola, Columbus found continued misfortune, renewed Indian war, and schism among the settlers. One of the group, Francisco Roldan, had threatened to assassinate Columbus' brothers and retired with his followers to found a separatist colony in the interior of the island. Columbus' attempts to reconcile the factions proved unavailing. Both sides complained to the Spanish monarchs, who sent a governor, Francisco de Bobadilla, to assume control. In October, 1500, Bobadilla sent Columbus and his brothers back to Spain in chains. [In his letter of 1500 to Juana de la Torre, Columbus expresses bitterness and characterizes the settlers in America as dis- solute, foolish, and malicious. Cecil Jane (trans. and ed.), "Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus" (London, 1930-33), II, 54 ff.] The year 1500 marks the end of Columbus' career as a colonial administrator. He was permitted one further voyage, his fourth (1502-4). Designed as a voyage of discovery, it was appropriate to his true talents and to his now reduced position in colonial administration. In terms of American discovery it was an expedition of some importance, for the party explored the coasts of Central America in regions that had not yet been visited by Europeans. But for Columbus himself it was the most unrewarding of the four voyages, plagued by storms, Indian warfare, and a mutiny, and interrupted by a year spent marooned on the island of Jamaica. Shortly after his return to Spain what further hope he entertained for future exploration was lost with the death of Isabella. Columbus himself died two years later. To the end of his life Columbus continued in the belief that his discoveries had been made in Far Eastern waters. His view may be regarded as an unrealistic one almost from the start, but it was consistent with the attitude of mystical determination that he characteristically adopted. Columbus did speak of an otro mundo, another world and a nuevo mundo, a new world, but his referenced were imprecise and conceptually associated with references to a new heaven, nuevo cielo, and a terrestrial paradise situated on a large bulge of the earth up the Orinoco River. [Columbus came to believe that the discovery was inspired by the Holy Ghost in time for the fulfillment of scriptural prophecies prior to the end of the world. John L. Phelan, "The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World: A Study of the Writings of Geronimo de Mendieta" (1525-1604) (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956), pp. 19 ff. analyzes his mystical, crusad- ing, apocalyptical, and messianic mentality.] The discoverer of America, an outstanding mariner even in his age of extraordinary maritime feats, never comprehended the implications of his achievement. Its full implications, of course, came to be recognized only over a long period, as the later protracted search for a western passage shows. But already during his lifetime, new voyages, new diplomatic and imperial designs, and new geographical conceptions were directing the course of events progressively farther from Columbus' interpretation, as well as from his control, of American affairs. The new rival expeditions were stimulated partly by Columbus' discovery, on the third voyage. of pearl fisheries off the Venezuelan mainland. In 1499 Alonso de Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa traversed some of the northern shore of South America, in the Guiana-Venezuela region, proceeding as far west as the Gulf of Maracaibo. In the same region, on an independent voyage, Peralonso Nino gathered a profitable cargo of pearls during his voyage of 1499-1500. An expedition commanded by Vicente Yanez Pinzon coasted north from the vicinity of Pernambuco in Brazil to the pearl fisheries, and other mariners explored further the Brazilian, Venezuelan, Colombian, and Panamanian shores. [Edward Gaylord Bourne, "Spain in America, 1450-1580" (New York and London, 1904), pp. 67 ff.] In Portuguese expansion the Pedro Alvares Cabral expedition of 1500 followed immediately upon Vasco da Gama's successful voyage to India by the eastern route (1497- 99). [William Brooks Greenlee (trans. and ed.), "The Voyage of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India from Contemporary Documents and Narratives" (London, 1938).] Taking a long south- westerly initial course for the trip around Africa, Cabral struck the Brazilian coast before continuing eastward to India, a circumstance frequently cited to indicate the inevitability of the discovery of America under the conditions of the late fif- teenth century. [The view that Columbus was not the discoverer is developed in various ways in Rasmus B. Andreson, "America Not Discovered by Columbus: A Historical Sketch of the discovery of America by the Norsemen, in the Tenth Century" (Chicago, 1874); Frederick J. Pohl, "Atlantic Crossings Before Columbus" (New York, 1961); Charles Michael Boland, "They All Discovered America" (New York, 1963); William Giles Nash, "America, The True History of Its Discovery" (London, 1924); and many other works. See also the argument that America was invented rather than discovered, in O'Gorman, "The Invention of America."] The most celebrated of the followers of Columbus, for the reason that his name was applied to the two continents of America, was the Florentine sailor Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512). There is a complex and still unresolved controversy concerning his voyaging. According to his own statement, Vespucci first visited America in 1497. But it is at least possible that this was a deliberate falsification and that in reality his earliest visit occurred in 1499-1500 with the Ojeda expedition. He claimed to have made four voyages in all, the last (1501-2 and 1503-4) designed to explore the American shores for Portugal and to reach the East Indies by the westward route. [The Vespucci question is one of the puzzling features of scholarship on discovery and exploration. The "classic" view of historians is expressed by Clements Markham, the editor of Vespucci's letters in English: "The evidence against Vespucci is cumulative and quite conclusive. His first voyage is a fabrication. He cannot be acquitted of the intention of appropriating for himself the glory of having first discovered the mainland. The impartial and upright Las Casas, after carefully weighing the evidence, found him guilty. This verdict has been, and will continue to be, confirmed by posterity." Amerigo Vespucci, "The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents Illustrative of His Career," Clements R. Markham, trans. and ed. (London, 1894), p. xxxix. Alberto Magnaghi in "Amerigo Vespucci: studio critico, con speciale riguardo ad una nuova valutazione delle fonti" (2 vols., Rome, 1924), proposed that Vespucci made only the two voyages and that the letters describing the other tow are spurious. See also Roberto Levillier, "America la bien llamada" (2 vols., Buenos Aires, 1948), and German Arciniegas, "Amerigo and the New World: The Life and Times of Amerigo Vespucci," Harriet de Onis, trans. (New York, 1955).] Certain of Vespucci's letters, containing vivid descriptions of the New World, received wide and repeated publication in the years following 1503, and it is on these publications that his contemporary fame chiefly depended. Although he became the official piloto mayor of Spain, and although he appears to have sailed in the service of both Spain and Portugal, his greatest influence was confined to the European countries north of the Pyrenees, where the support given him by the geographer Martin Waldsmuller encouraged the adoption of the name America (feminine by analogy with Europa, Africa, and Asia) for the lands of the Western Hemisphere. In Spain and its colonies the name America was not used, and the new lands con- tinued to be known as Las Indias, The Indies. In all, the decade and a half after 1492 witnessed a prodi- gious maritime expansion, and its general meaning was quickly recognized and understood at the time. In a sense the nature of this expansion was determined by the direction that Portuguese interest had been taking since the time of Prince Henry and by the necessarily competitive role occupied by Spain. Portuguese activity lay chiefly in the areas south and east of Europe. Spain, unable to operate effectively in these areas, found in America an alternative or compensatory field for exploration. Other nations, for a variety of reasons, were still only par- tially or intermittently concerned. Hence a division of interest between the two Hispanic nations remained for the moment suffi- cient. In practice the western world of Spain and the eastern world of Portugal impinged upon each other only in the region of Brazil, which, although a part of the "New World," adjoined the normal Portuguese circum-Africa route. It was on account of the proximity or supposed proximity of America to Africa that ter- ritorial controversies similar to those of the 1470's arose in the New World. The Treaty of Alcacovas had been predicated on a limited knowledge of overseas geography. The history of Spanish- Portuguese diplomatic relations after Alcacovas, a history in which the Alcacovas principle was extended over a far larger area, resulted in the earliest colonial division of American territory, that by which Brazil came to be Portuguese and the remainder of Hispanic America Spanish. The revised Spanish-Portuguese division of empire had its basis in peninsular and papal diplomacy of the 1490's. From the mid-fifteenth century it had been customary for popes to grant to the Portuguese monarchs rights of sovereignty over lands dis- covered and of enslavement over non-Christian peoples in Africa. Papal authority in these matters rested on the popes' traditional role as international mediators and also upon the special papal control over relations between Christians and pagans. [Luis Weckmann, "Las bulas alejandrinas de 1493 y la teoria politica del papado medieval: Estudio sobre la supremacia papal sobre islas, 1091-1493" (Mexico, 1949). F. Mateos, "Bulas portugesas y espanolas sobre descubrimientos geograficas," "Missionalia hispanica," XIX (1962), 5-34, 129-168.] As early as the 1450's a papal bull contained the phrase "as far as the Indies," and the papal tradition of the late fifteenth century manifestly con- firmed Portuguese rights in American discovery as well as in the vague regions beyond. It was in this tradition that the Spanish sovereigns communicated with their own representatives in Rome in the spring of 1493. Their intention was to receive papal dona- tion of Columbus' findings comparable to the donations previously received by the Portuguese in Africa and "as far as the Indies." The donation was forthcoming in three celebrated bulls of 1493. Two authorized Spanish title to the Columbian discoveries and other non-Christian western lands still to be discovered, specifically for the propagation of the Christian faith. The third limited the donation to an area west of an Atlantic meridian drawn on a north-south axis one hundred leagues west of the cape Verde and Azores islands. The geographical assumptions and terminology of this third bull were vague, for the line was to be distant "toward west and south" and the one-hundred-league measurement was to begin both at the Cape Verde and at the Azores islands, indefinite starting points at best. There is evidence that the Spanish monarchs may have requested a meridian farther to the east and that they were therefore not fully satisfied with the papal pronouncement. But the third bull interfered more directly with Portuguese than with Spanish expansion, for in effect it forbade Portuguese claims to land in the western Atlantic. Also, and equally important, it did not limit a Spanish claim to the Far East through a western circumnavigation of the globe. [H. Vander Linden, "Alexander VI and the Demarca- tion of the Maritime and Colonial Domains of Spain and Portugal, 1493-1494," "American Historical Review", XXII (1916-17), 1-20, precisely analyzes the bulls and emphasizes their pro-Spanish tendencies. The texts of the bulls are published in Davenport (ed.), "European Treaties," pp. 9 ff.] The Portuguese for their part had already taken steps to maintain the advantage in overseas discovery. The Portuguese king, within a few weeks of his interview with Columbus in 1493, had prepared a fleet with which to assert Portuguese control of the new lands, an action consistent with the monarch's official position that the Columbian territories lay within Portuguese jurisdiction. At Spanish request John II postponed the departure of this fleet pending diplomatic conferences with Spanish envoys over the question of imperial rights. Spain meanwhile held its own fleet in readiness to forestall any determined Portuguese move. A Portuguese caravel did in fact set out, but whether this was by order of John II, as the Spaniards believed, or in viola- tion of his order, as the Portuguese insisted, remains unclear. Diplomatic negotiations between Spanish and Portuguese envoys began in August, 1493, by which time Spanish preparations for Columbus' second voyage were well advanced. In the negotiations the envoys of both nations appear to have been incompletely informed both of previous agreements and of the geographical location of Columbus' discoveries. It is certain that Ferdinand and Isabella took advantage of the negotiations to gain time, and this may have been the principal value of the diplomacy for them. In any case, they requested a revision of the papal statement, to the effect that islands or other lands lying to the east of the established meridian might now be included within the Spanish sphere. Alexander VI, a Spanish Borgia occupying the papal throne, was thus persuaded to issue a fourth bull, Dudum siquidem, dated September 26, 1493. Its effect was to nullify the previous authorizations favoring the Portuguese and to reveal the papacy as a thoroughly pro-Spanish power. By the terms of the bull Spain became free to engage in world wide exploration by westward or southern navigation, and the Pope specifically mentioned India as a land accessible to Spain. Only the actual possessions of Christian princes were now excluded. [The text is in Davenport (ed.), "European Treaties," pp. 79 ff.] Thus Spain employed to advantage the earliest diplomatic negotiations with the papacy and with the Portuguese. But in the next year Spain inadvertently relinquished some of her gains by the Treaty of Tordesillas, according to which Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence were defined by a new meridian, 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. This line, dividing the Atlantic approximately midway between the Azores and the West Indies, was intended as a peaceful compromise settlement in apparent recognition of the claims and rights of both parties and without the antecedent warfare that had attended the settlement of Alcacovas in 1479. The Tordesillas agreement further provided for joint measurement by a naval expedition, and the contracting parties stated their intention to request papal confirmation of the new decision [For the text of the Treaty of Tordesillas, see ibid., pp. 84 ff. Our interpretation follows and depends on that of Charles E. Nowell, "The Treaty of Tordesillas and the Dip- lomatic Background of American History," in "Greater America: Essays in Honor of Herbert Eugene Bolton" (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1945), pp. 1-18.] The treaty presented, to be sure, a number of practical difficulties, for the exact starting point in the Cape Verde Islands was not specified and the distance itself, in the geographical knowledge of the time, was subject to variant interpretation. Columbus, at this time in the West Indies on his second voyage, was invited by the Spanish monarchs to aid in the measurement, but the matter was postponed and in the end no expedition of measurement was sent. Columbus, furthermore, regarded the Treaty of Tordesillas as an unwarranted intrusion upon his own personal privileges. It later appeared that he had continued to think of a line distant only a hundred leagues from the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. Learned opinions on the distance, drawing on Erastosthenes, Strabo, and other ancient geographers differed sharply from one another. In any case no dependable means were available in the fifteenth century for the accurate computation of longitudinal distances. With the further exploration of America by Columbus and others after 1494, it became apparent that at Tordesillas the Spaniards had unknowingly granted to Portugal a substantial section of the South American coast. In appreciation of this King Emmanuel of Portugal requested and received from Julius II the bull Ea quae (1506), which endorsed the Tordesillas meridian and thus rendered it more binding upon Spain. [Davenport (ed.), "European Treaties," pp. 107 ff.] In the early years of the sixteenth century both Spanish and Portuguese geographers under- stood the Tordesillas line to strike the continent of South America approximately at the mouth of the Amazon. Minor dis- crepancies in the computed position were not of immediate or practical significance, and the tendency on the part of both nations was to pay only scant attention to the exact location. But in the second decade of the century, when the Portuguese were gaining new knowledge of the coasts to the south, the matter came to be of greater importance, and the possible claims of Spain to areas exploited by the Portuguese began to receive serious attention. The question was equally commonly made in Spain (though not explicitly stated in 1494) was that the Tordesillas line should be projected around the world into the Asiatic hemisphere. The relation of the extended line to the Portuguese controlled Spice Islands in the Far East became a matter of more acute concern with the first circumnavigation of the world, by the Magellan-del Cano expedition, in 1519-21. The plan of Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese with experience in the East, was similar to the original scheme of Columbus, but it was informed by a more precise knowledge of geography than any available to the discoverer of America. Not only had the south- eastern coasts of South America been visited approximately as far as the Plata estuary, but the existence of the Pacific Ocean, first seen at Panama in 1513 by a Spanish expedition under Vasco Nunez de Balboa, was now well known. The size of the Pacific was of course unknown, and this very uncertainty gave rise to Spanish hopes that the Spice Islands might fall within the Spanish sphere, i.e. east of an extended Tordesillas line. The Portuguese, now firmly established in the Spice Islands and deriving from them a profit far in excess of what Spain derived from the West Indies, had little interest in seeing these Spanish hopes tested or proved. The Portuguese interest lay in a status quo diplomatically undefined, and the Portuguese came to sub- scribe to the view that the Tordesillas line was properly con- fined to the Atlantic hemisphere. This view was supported by a pro-Portuguese papal bull in 1514. But Magellan, believing that a comparatively short distance separated the Molucca Islands from the western coast of South America, was proposing an expedition to disrupt the papal and Portuguese view of Pacific geography. Magellan's project lay clearly within the Spanish interest. It was supported by the Spanish royal government and it was realized in spite of determined Portuguese efforts to forestall it. The expedition set out in September, 1519. Passing into the Pacific through the strait named for him at the southern tip of South America, Magellan turned his ships across the world's largest body of water. The voyage has commonly, and correctly, been regarded as among the most stupendous achievements in the entire history of navigation [The torments of the voyage are graphically described by its chief chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta. During the four-month open stretch in the Pacific, food was reduced to the powder of the original biscuits infested with worms and impregnated with rat urine. The crew ate the oxhide cover of the mainyard. many died of scurvy. Charles E. Nowell (ed.), "Magellan's Voyage Around the World: Three Contemporary Accounts" (Evanston, Ill., 1962), pp. 122-123.] Magellan and a number of his followers were killed in a Philippine war in the spring of 1521. Juan Sebastian del Cano continued to the Spice Islands, where a profitable commerce was transacted,a nd thence southwestward around Africa and home to Spain, the entire journey occupying a period of three years. Although the means of verify- ing the exact size of the world were still not appreciably better than in the time of Eratosthenes two thousand years before, the Magellan-del Cano expedition demonstrated empirically its approximate size, and above all indicated that an enormous expanse of water separated the western coast of America from the Far East. The true or nearly true geographical relation between America and the other land masses of the world thus came to be understood in the 1520's. [On the other hand one should beware of supposing that the Magellan voyage sharply changed existing geographical opinion. It was still possible to suppose that the Pacific Ocean lay principally in the southern hemisphere and that America and Asia were connected in the north as a single con- tinent. This is the form shown on the world map of Giacomo Gastaldi. See ibid., pp. 342-343.] The knowledge stimulated a number of new Spanish-Portuguese diplomatic negotiations pertain- ing to the status of the Spice Islands, which were now actively claimed by both nations. In the Treaty of Victoria (1524) Portugal and Spain agreed to appoint lawyers, pilots, and astrologers to fix the overseas demarcation, [Davenport (ed.), "European Treaties," pp. 118 ff.] and these experts met in the Junta de Badajoz in the same year. But their consultation came to an end without agreement. Geographers unable to decide upon the location of the meridian in the Atlantic hemisphere were even more uncertain regarding the projected meridian in the Pacific hemisphere. The Portuguese were anxious to move the original Tordesillas meridian westward in order to gain control of a maximum territory in Brazil, but they were unwilling to do this if the consequent westward shifting of the Pacific arc would entail the loss of the Molucca Islands. In the mid-1520's clashes between Portuguese and Spaniards in the East demonstrated the effective superiority of the Portuguese forces there. Charles V, in financial difficulties, at war with France, and with ever weaker claims in the Orient, found an opportunity finally in the Treaty of Saragossa (1529) to make the best of his unfavorable situation. [For the text of the Treaty of Saragosa, see ibid., pp. 146 ff.] In exchange for 350,000 ducats the emperor yielded his claim to the East Indies, and an arbitrary Pacific line was drawn seventeen degrees east of the island, which thus fell to the Portuguese. The diplomats failed to arrive at a precise agreement for the Atlantic line (a reverse projection would have placed all of South America within Spanish jurisdiction), and the earlier positions, with their variants, remained as approximations of what was essentially an unmarked boundary. The subsequent growth of Brazil, a consequence of expansion in colonial times, belongs to another order of events. Only much later, with the Treaty of Madrid (1750) and the Treaty of San Ildefonso (1777), were the expanded areas of Portuguese control in America formally recognized by Spain. And the final settlement of the Brazilian boundary, like that of many other parts of Hispanic America, remained incomplete at the conclusion of the colonial period. The outlines of the overseas area to be occupied by Spain were, however, already fixed. Save for the Philippines, Spanish interest was confined to the American hemisphere. America would be to Spain what the East Indies were to Portugal, in a disposi- tion the essential features of which were resolved in the years immediately following 1492. Within America the particular regions to be subjected to Spanish influence were determined equally early. Columbus' landfall in the West Indies meant an immediate concentration of Caribbean and Central American territories. Spain dismissed the northern coasts, where Cabot established the English and Verrazano the French claims. To the south Spain reached ad hoc agreements with her peninsular rival Portugal, yielded Brazil, and demoted the whole Atlantic coast of Spanish South America. With a peculiar concentration Spain seemed driven precisely toward the areas that would yield the greatest and most immediate wealth, Mexico and Peru. The reorientation in world knowledge that this whole process entailed as suggested by the series of four pictorial maps shown in illustrations 1-4 (following page 82). The first is a "world map" of about 1200 from a Psalter in the British Museum. It shows the known world in circular form, with Jerusalem as its absolute middle point. ["Thus saith the Lord God; This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her." Ezekiel 5:5.] The repre- sentation is confined at the periphery, fixed at the center, and wholly symmetrical in form. By contrast, the reconstructed Toscanelli map of the pre-Columbian fifteenth century (illustr- ation 2) is in the form of a rectangle with the Atlantic coast of Europe and Africa at the extreme right and the Pacific coast of Asia at the extreme left. Its central section is one ocean, containing the islands of Cipangu and Antilia, an unobstructed waterway between Europe and Asia. The Juan de la Cosa protolan chart of 1500 (illustration 3) shows the post-Columbian world, with Europe, Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, the West Indies, and portions of the South American coast in careful and surprisingly accurate detail. It ignores the Pacific (Columbus is reported to have censured Juan de la Cosa for depicting Cuba as an island rather than as part of Asia), and it leaves in doubt the relation of America to the Orient. The northern part of the American hemisphere is glossed as an English discovery. In an elaborate pictorial and verbal conceit, Columbus is shown as St. Christopher, the bearer of Christ to the New World. The fourth map, by Diego Ribero (Ribeiro), reflects the Magellanic world of the late 1520's. Ribero, a Portuguese, was royal cosmographer at the court of Spain and was entrusted with the revision of the Padron real, a master map for pilots. He placed Europe and Asia to the right, America at the center, and the vast Pacific in an impressive left-hand expanse. The accuracy of the American outline is remarkable. Place names and historical notes are provided in meticulous detail. Ribero's world was divided almost exactly in half by the Tordesillas line, separating Spanish and Portuguese spheres. Thus in three cartographic centuries the world expanded, the coastline took form, the oceans were identified, and the New World, cut by a Spanish-Portuguese division, replaced Jerusalem as the focal center. The process of expansion accelerated in time. Above all, the generation that lived in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries--the generation of Erasmus, Copernicus, Machiavelli, and Leonardo da Vinci--witnessed the most rapid transformation in geographical knowledge and experience that the world had ever known. When this generation was born, the frontier of Europe seemed to have been temporarily halted. Constantinople had fallen and Christian Europe had lost territory to the Ottoman Empire. Portuguese coastal voyaging in African waters was being less systematically directed than before, and mariners were still reluctant to sail out of sight of land. The southern part of the Iberian peninsula remained in non-Christian control. European travels to China and India had sharply declined in number and importance. Yet by the time that this generation died, America had been discovered, India reached, and the world circumnavigated. The "Renaissance," a period whose dimensions and limits have repeatedly defied historical inves- tigation, is nowhere more conspicuously or measurably evident that in this sudden burgeoning of geographical movement and knowledge. In the new geographical movement the Spanish discovery of America was a central and dominant event. The remarkable rapidity of expansion--Diaz in 1487, Columbus in 1492, da Gama in 1498, Magellan in 1519-21--emphasizes the movement's continuity and inner connections. The fact that all the leaders of expan- sion were employed in the service of Spain or Portugal again relates the events to a concentrated Iberian historical process. Portugal and Spain were beyond all question the leading nations in this first stage of the expansion of Europe. The Iberian peninsula formed a separate state system within Europe, with its own national rivalries and jealousies. The gross outlines of Iberian political geography were instantly and magnificently mirrored in the political divisions of the New World, where Portugal received a part and Spain a larger part, and where for a century no non-Iberian power was able to establish more than a temporary foothold. GIBSON01.NTS