Chapter 139. Cross, Crown and Conquest: Religion, Colonialism and the Missions

The papal claim to dispose of kingdoms, examined in the previous chapter, reached its widest extent when Europe crossed the oceans. A pope divided the newly found world between two Catholic crowns. Theologians debated whether its inhabitants were fully human. Missionaries followed the soldiers, and in some cases opposed them. This chapter sets the main sources of the LSN library against each other: an apologetic volume drawn from the Vatican Secret Archives, Michael Kerrigan’s critical Dark History of the Catholic Church, an anthropological essay on papal bulls, Frank O’Collins’s polemical Almanac of Evil, Jeff Fynn-Paul’s revisionist Not Stolen, John Aberth’s epidemiological history, the 1904 Encyclopedia of Missions, and reference works on Hinduism and African medicine. Casualty figures belong to whoever gives them, and are reported as such.

The bulls of donation

The Vatican Secret Archives volume presents the founding document as “Pope Alexander VI’s bull Inter Caetera of May 3, 1493, which divided the spheres of influence in the New World between Spain and Portugal”. On a 1502 map it shows the boundary drawn by Alexander VI running “about 342 miles west of the Azores”, with Spain holding exclusive rights to lands discovered west of it [Vatican Secret Archives, #68123, ch. 5]. O’Collins dates the bull to 1493 without a day, and other accounts give 4 May. The discrepancy has a documentary explanation. The pope issued edicts dated both 3 and 4 May 1493, and the bull of 4 May set the line “100 leagues west and south of any of the islands of the Azores or the Cape Verde islands”. It remained disputed “whether the pope intended a ‘donation’ of sovereignty or an infeudation or investiture”. The Spanish crown and the conquistadors took it “in the widest possible sense” [Wikipedia: Inter caetera]. Spain and Portugal then moved the line by their own agreement in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and divided the world “into exclusive spheres of influence, trade and colonization” [Wikipedia: Christianity and colonialism].

O’Collins, an anti-clerical writer who frames papal history as a criminal indictment, gives the bull its most extreme reading. Entry 92, “Of crimes against humanity (1493)”, states that a “papal bull declares church under king Ferdinand is entitled to all land in South America: ‘If the Indians refuse, he may quite legally fight them, kill them and enslave them, just as Joshua enslaved the inhabitants of Canaan.'” Entry 93 charges that under Cortés “30,000,000 Aztecs and Mayans die over years” [O’Collins, The Almanac of Evil, #76627, ch. 15, entries 92-93]. These are O’Collins’s own figures and characterisations; the entry gives no source reference for the words it quotes from the bull.

Contradictory doctrine: Ostia, Aquinas and Sublimis Deus

The essay on indigenous rights in Polyphonic Anthropology argues that papal doctrine pointed in two directions. One line ran from the thirteenth-century canonist known as Ostiensis, the Archbishop of Ostia and author of the Summa Aurea, who held “that the heathen peoples had only enjoyed sovereignty until Christ” came. This implied that the pope could distribute their lands. Against him, “the canonist pope Innocent IV, also in the XIII century, had argued that the papacy could not strip the faithful of their domains and jurisdictions … [and] Thomas Aquinas argued against the Ostian that the coming of Christ had not annulled the chattels and sovereignty of the heathen peoples” [Canevacci (ed.), Polyphonic Anthropology, #31455]. The essay says that Indians were treated as sub-human until “it took a papal bull from Pope Paul III of 1537, Sublimis Deus, to say ‘sunt vero homines'” (they are truly men). Another text of Paul III, “the Veritas Ipsa bull of June 9, 1537”, placed “the Indians on the same level of humanity as other men, prohibiting slavery” [Canevacci (ed.), #31455].

The Spanish crown’s legal instrument of conquest was the Requerimiento of 1513, drafted by the jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios on behalf of Ferdinand II and Joanna of Castile. It declared “Castile’s divinely ordained right to take possession of the territories of the New World and to subjugate, exploit and, when necessary, to fight the native inhabitants”. It was read aloud to Native Americans, so that those who resisted could be treated as “defying God’s plan”. Its precedent was Nicholas V’s bull Dum Diversas (1452), which allowed Portugal to reduce war-conquered “Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers” to hereditary slavery [Wikipedia: Spanish Requirement of 1513].

Valladolid, 1550-1551

Kerrigan describes the formal confrontation. “In 1550-51, an important debate was held in Valladolid, then the Spanish capital”, between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas. “Up for discussion was the question of whether the indigenous peoples of ‘New Spain’ should be considered human, in the way that Europeans were.” Kerrigan explains the frame. European opinion had reached “a consensus … that, while the enslavement of Christians was self-evidently an outrage and the enslavement of anyone less than ideal, in one case slavery could be justified”: the case of those who were slaves by nature. “Were such beings to be treated as equals? Or should they be taken under subjection for their own sake? Sepúlveda eloquently argued the latter case. On the contrary, Las Casas maintained, the ‘Indians’ were entitled to exactly the same treatment as Europeans” [Kerrigan, Dark History of the Catholic Church, #71131].

The Vatican Secret Archives volume stresses the Church’s defence of the natives. It cites Francisco de Vitoria’s Salamanca lectures of 1532, which maintained that the natives had the same rights as other men. It cites Charles V’s New Laws of 1542, “prohibiting the enslavement and forced labor of Native Americans”. On Valladolid it reports: “After the debate, both sides claimed victory. But the royal court decreed that Las Casas was in the right” [Vatican Secret Archives, #68123, ch. 5].

The death toll: atrocity, disease and revision

The critical sources stress deliberate violence. Kerrigan quotes a description of conquistadors who “forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women”, and who “even placed bets on whether they could cut a man in two”. He records that, “by their own testimony”, Cortés’s men killed 30,000 people at Cholula, and that “some 200,000 may have died at Tenochtitlán”. He adds that “the worst of the destruction they brought was quite unwitting – the introduction of germs to which New World natives were not immune” [Kerrigan, #71131]. The Encyclopedia of World History reports Las Casas’s accusation: “According to the Spanish priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, Alvarado was responsible for the deaths of 4 to 5 million Indians in Guatemala between 1524 and 1540” [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204].

Aberth places the collapse within the history of epidemics. He reports that “the latest consensus has coalesced around the idea that disease must interact with other cultural factors, in this case primarily colonial or imperialistic oppression, in order to satisfactorily explain the collapse of Native American societies”. He judges that “there is probably nothing to compare with the concerted assault from European colonial powers” on populations already weakened by disease [Aberth, Plagues in World History, #66467].

Fynn-Paul argues against the prevailing narrative. He summarises it as the view that Europeans reduced “the Native peoples nearly to extinction”, were “racists who engaged in slavery on a massive scale” and set up “exploitative proto-capitalist trading systems”. He replies that “for hundreds of years after the Europeans arrived in America, they harbored no plan to displace the majority of Indigenous people”. In most places “the goal was to maintain coastal trading forts”, and “in the Black Sea, in West Africa, and in the Portuguese Indian Ocean Empire, these trading forts had only a very limited effect on local peoples” [Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen, #64167, chs. 1, 5].

Protestant missions and the British Empire

In Asia the Protestant missions grew together with British power. The Encyclopedia of Hinduism records that “a new era began in 1706 with the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries, Lutherans who began their missionary efforts from a base in Tranquebar”. It adds that “mission work did not begin in earnest until the early 19th century, when it won the backing of British colonial authorities”, and that “the number of conversions was modest”. Later Indian church leaders such as V. S. Azariah, the first native Anglican bishop, “criticized Western missionaries for failing to distinguish between the faith they expounded and the Western culture from which they emerged” [Jones & Ryan, Encyclopedia of Hinduism, #42241].

The Encyclopedia of Missions, written from inside the movement, states the alliance openly. Early missionaries of one society “had been obliged to go to India by way of America, because passage was denied them in the vessels of the East India Company”, and Judson was “driven from Bengal by the East India Company”. By the time of writing the entry could say: “In their own sphere of moral and religious influence missionaries have cooperated with English statesmen, and rendered a service of value both to Great Britain and to India. The strange and unwarranted attitude of the old East India Company toward missionary effort has long ago changed, and the value of missions to British interests” was recognised. It forecast that “the year 1910 will witness a Protestant community of more than one million and a quarter in this great empire” [The Encyclopedia of Missions, #64675, “India”].

Africa, India and religious-cultural resistance

In Africa, the essay on African medicine in Selin’s Medicine Across Cultures states that “new ideas about health were part of this colonialism, ideas that discredited African medical systems. Missionaries and colonial regimes came to evangelize Africa”. It notes that healing “cults and shrines have related to Christianity and Islam for centuries” [Selin (ed.), Medicine Across Cultures, #29343, “African Medicine”]. A missionary quoted in the reference literature defined colonialism as “a form of imperialism based on a divine mandate”, bringing “the blessings of the Christ-inspired civilization of the West” to peoples “suffering under satanic oppression”. Later historians called missionaries “ideological shock troops for colonial invasion”, while Lamin Sanneh argued that missions were “far more, and far less” than that charge allows [Wikipedia: Christianity and colonialism].

Colonised peoples also answered with their own religious and cultural programmes. Joseph Alter shows that institutional physical education was “directly linked to the ideology of muscular Christianity”. Swami Kuvalayananda (J. G. Gune) began in a gymnastic tradition meant “to promote a form of strong, masculine, assertive anti-colonial nationalism”. He then turned yoga into a “scientific” regimen of āsana and prāṇāyāma, which he spread as director of physical education in the Bombay Presidency [Alter, Yoga and Physical Education, #52893]. Christianity’s colonial expansion also had an Islamic parallel. Islam spread “through either trade, missionaries, exploration or gradual conversions after conquests” [Wikipedia: Islamic missionary activity].

Key points

• The Vatican Secret Archives volume dates Inter caetera to 3 May 1493 and others give 4 May. Alexander VI issued bulls on both days, and the 4 May text set a line 100 leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde, later moved by Tordesillas (1494) [#68123; Wikipedia].
• O’Collins reads the bull as licensing Ferdinand to kill and enslave Indians “as Joshua enslaved the inhabitants of Canaan” and gives 30,000,000 Aztec and Maya dead. These are O’Collins’s own figures, given without a source reference in the entry [#76627].
• The Polyphonic Anthropology essay shows papal doctrine split between Ostiensis (heathen sovereignty ended with Christ) and Innocent IV, Aquinas and Paul III’s Sublimis Deus (1537) [#31455].
• At Valladolid (1550-51), according to Kerrigan, Sepúlveda argued for subjecting natural slaves and Las Casas for equal treatment. The Vatican Secret Archives volume says the royal court ruled for Las Casas [#71131, #68123].
• Las Casas charged Alvarado with 4-5 million deaths in Guatemala [#5204]. Aberth reports a consensus that disease combined with colonial oppression [#66467]. Fynn-Paul argues that trading forts had “only a very limited effect” and that displacement was never the plan [#64167].
• Protestant missions in India started at Tranquebar in 1706 but grew only with British backing. The Encyclopedia of Missions openly praised missionaries for having “cooperated with English statesmen” in Britain’s interest [#42241, #64675].
• In Africa missions and colonial regimes discredited indigenous healing systems [#29343]. In India, Kuvalayananda’s scientific yoga answered colonial “muscular Christianity” [#52893].