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Matthew P. Cavedon – From the Pope’s Hands to Indigenous Lands
79 Plays9 months ago
In this episode, we hear from Matthew P. Cavedon, the Robert Pool Fellow in Law and Religion at Emory’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, and a Senior Lecturer at Emory Law School.
His recent book, “From the Pope's Hands to Indigenous Lands: Alexander VI in Spanish Imperialism,” explores the historical impact of "inter caetera"– a papal bull issued in 1493 with wide-ranging influence on Spanish Christendom and the Catholic Church's stronghold on the New World at the cusp of modern imperialism.
The book seeks to shed light on the influence of notable clergymen and social reformers, including Bartolomé de Las Casas, and their efforts to advocate for indigenous rights. Matt’s work meticulously contextualizes these contested stories and sheds light on the nuance of lived experience under Spanish Imperialism.
- From the Pope’s Hand to Indigenous Lands: From the Pope’s Hand to Indigenous Lands
- Matthew P. Cavedon faculty page:Robert Pool Fellow in Law and Religion | Emory University School of Law | Atlanta, GA
- CSLR Website:Center for the Study of Law and Religion | Emory University School of Law | Atlanta, GA
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Transcript
Intercatra as a Justification for War
00:00:04
Speaker
the recumatory miento turned intercatera, this legal document from a pope decades before, into the basis for a script that was read over and over again right as the Spanish arrived to take control of indigenous lands. What a strange journey for this document to have gone from, again, being a formulaic legal recitation to being a cry for war.
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:29
Speaker
Welcome to the Interactions Podcast, brought to you by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Now in its 40th year, our center explores the interactions of law and religion through research and scholarship, teaching and training, and public programs. This season of interactions features interviews with faculty and fellows within the CSLR community to discuss their path-breaking scholarship.
Matthew Cavadon's Exploration of Intercatra
00:00:51
Speaker
In this episode, we hear from Matthew Cavadon. Matt is the Robert Poole Fellow in Law and Religion at Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion and a senior lecturer at Emory Law School. His recent book, From the Pope's Hands to Indigenous Lands, Alexander VI and Spanish Imperialism explores the historical impact of intercatera, a papal bull issued in 1493 with wide-ranking influences of Spanish Christendom and the Catholic Church's stronghold on the New World at the cusp of modern imperialism.
00:01:21
Speaker
The book seeks to shed light on the influence of notable clergymen and social reformers, including Partiloma de las Casas, and their efforts to advocate for indigenous rights. Matt's work meticulously contextualizes these contested stories and sheds light on the nuance of lived experiences under Spanish imperialism. Thank you for listening to the Interactions podcast.
00:01:49
Speaker
Good afternoon. My name is Whitney Barth, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion and the Charlotte McDaniel Scholar.
00:01:55
Speaker
And my name is John Bernah, a sociologist and director of digital scholarship at the center. Today we're joined by Matthew Cavadon, Robert Poole fellow in law and religion and senior lecturer at Emory Law. Matt, thanks for joining us today. Pleasure to be here, thank you.
Impact of Intercatra on Spanish Imperialism
00:02:10
Speaker
So your new book is about the influence of a document that was issued by Pope Alexander called Intercatra. Let's start by having you tell us a bit about this document, you know, what it is, why it's significant.
00:02:22
Speaker
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and not too long after he arrived back in Europe, having discovered some islands with people in them, something that he did not expect. He had initially sailed to reach the East Indies on a diplomatic and commercial mission over to the court of the Great Khan. He believed that he had made it to India. That's why he called what he had discovered the Indies.
00:02:47
Speaker
Obviously, we know that he did not. He discovered what we now know as the Western Hemisphere. When he arrived back in Europe, the court of Spain, or rather of Castile at that point still, but it would be succeeded by Spain within a couple of generations, the court of Castile approached the Pope. They wanted the Pope to issue a document ratifying that Castile had dominion, had political power and rightful control of all the newly discovered lands.
00:03:16
Speaker
This was a fairly common part of practice in the early colonial period, and it helped to sort out claims among the competing European powers, Spain, Portugal, England, France, and so on. So Spain approached the Pope, Pope Alexander VI, known to some people now as the Borgia Pope. He led quite a scandalous personal life. He was, in fact, a member of the famed Borgia family.
00:03:43
Speaker
and they requested that he issue a document confirming their claims to land and to political control over these societies. The pope responded by issuing what was a pretty formulaic document. Among other things, though, it granted Castile dominion over the various lands, cities, islands, and so on to be found west of Cape Verde and the Azore Islands from pole to pole.
00:04:13
Speaker
the significance of that document at the time nobody could have predicted. But it has become a major flashpoint historically as people think back about the early beginnings of imperialism and try to address the Catholic Church and later European governments in terms of issues like indigenous rights, human rights, historical responsibility, and so on.
00:04:39
Speaker
This document went from being a fairly brief and again formulaic legal document into being a major part of modern controversy, especially in religious indigenous dialogues. So let's pick up on that. So one of the goals of the book, you say, is to discuss the ways in which this document is remembered. But then you go on to complicate that memory and situate the document within this larger context, which I think you're beginning to hint at here. So in short, why is it important for us to revisit that collective memory today?
00:05:09
Speaker
People already are revisiting that collective memory today, and I don't know that it's my place to say why people should or shouldn't do that. Ever since the 1970s, a lot of scholarship and activism has raised
00:05:24
Speaker
the so-called doctrine of discovery as an important part of European ideologies in early modernity, and I'll unpack that a little bit. A number of critics have said that Europeans in those early centuries of colonization came up with a rule by which they would immediately take control of lands occupied by indigenous peoples, be it the Americas, Australia, other parts of the world, the Philippines,
00:05:55
Speaker
As there has been more criticism of that history of colonialism and imperialism, there has been a desire to figure out, all right, who historically bears responsibility for that era in human history. The Catholic Church is one of the relatively few institutions that is still around and powerful today with direct ties back to that era.
00:06:22
Speaker
So a lot of critics have identified the Catholic Church as bearing some measure of responsibility for colonialism and for imperialism. This idea of a doctrine of discovery, this idea that there was one rule that Europeans used to claim the lands not belonging to them, has in some ways been equated with this one document in Turkatera.
00:06:47
Speaker
There have been a number of folks who have said that the popes, Pope Alexander, gave the world away, gave it to Spain, Castile, gave it to Europeans and that that inaugurated this era of worldwide conquest and domination. Some critics have said that if the church were to denounce the doctrine of discovery nowadays,
00:07:08
Speaker
and to reject the legacy of intercedra, that that would have political, symbolic, maybe legal significance for land claims in places stretching from Canada to New Zealand, to parts of East Asia, to Africa and beyond.
Geopolitical Context of Intercatra
00:07:23
Speaker
Matt, part of the context of this document that you discuss is the conquest of Spain by Christians, and you explained that there was this simultaneous struggle by popes to reclaim political relevance within this geopolitical context. Can you tell us more about that struggle and what influence it had on Intercatra and its legacy?
00:07:47
Speaker
The 1400s were a time of a lot of geopolitical changes. Spain had been ruled by Islamic rulers who originally came from North Africa for over 700 years at that point. People may have heard of the Reconquista or the Reconquest when Spanish Christians, kingdom by kingdom, took back control of Spain, ultimately expelled non-Christians from those realms in the early 1500s.
00:08:17
Speaker
Spain was in many ways a rising power of a sort that really captivated the Christian imagination. Christians looked at Spain and saw it as potentially a new Rome. What really kicked off that phase of thinking about Spain was in the early 1500s, through marriage, through happenstance, the Spanish royal rulers, the Habsburgs,
00:08:47
Speaker
were also the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, which stretched all the way from Germany down into northern Italy through much of central Europe. There was a union of crowns at that point, including going east as far as Austria and Hungary. The Habsburgs looked like they might actually unite all of Europe.
00:09:09
Speaker
And Habsburgs were attempting marriages with the English. France certainly had some rivalries. They were never the only power in town. But for a brief moment, well, for a generation or two, it really did look like they might reestablish control of most of Europe.
00:09:28
Speaker
In addition, Spain happened to be the first ones, again, through Castile, who stumbled on this entire new world and had legal claim to all of South America, all of Central America, the Caribbean, and a wide swath of North America. It really did look like this might be a global empire of the kind that the world really hadn't seen before, and even Europe hadn't seen since, again, Rome, millennia before that.
00:09:55
Speaker
In the midst of all these changes, the papacy was, the popes were going back and forth about how much power they were going to have in this new world order. The papacy had had a rough century. This was around the time of the exile in Avignon, where the popes, because of Italian power politics, wound up having their court in southern France instead. They were away from Rome, the seat of St. Peter, the source of all of that symbolic power going all the way back to the apostles and the beginning of Christianity.
00:10:25
Speaker
A lot of the rulers of Europe had encroached more and more on traditional prerogatives and powers held by the popes, issues like taxation or exemption of it for church properties, whether secular courts would be able to try members of the clergy, things like that. This was the time when centralized states and absolutist monarchs were starting to become more and more a part of European life. And that often came at the expense of the church.
00:10:54
Speaker
Now, by the time that we're talking about, by the 1490s, the Popes had returns to Rome. Alexander issued intercatera from Rome. But there was still a lot of soul-searching about what sort of a role can the papacy play in European life and especially in European politics. There are spiritual sides to that as well. But the political question is a significant one.
00:11:20
Speaker
Some people will say that the efforts by the popes to influence politics back then didn't amount to a whole lot. That in fact, it was navies, it was marriages, it was wheeling and dealing among the royals that really did make the difference in terms of who got what. And in fact, Spain and Portugal within a couple, within a year of intercatera coming out, hashed out their own treaty sorting out who was gonna settle what parts of the Americas. But nevertheless,
00:11:49
Speaker
by getting involved again with issuing documents, sorting out international claims, trying to arrange a geopolitical order that would keep European Christians at peace, and helping to rally Christians looking eastward toward Asia.
00:12:07
Speaker
The popes were trying to reclaim a central role in European political life. One quick note about the Asian situation, part of the reason that Asia was of so much interest, part of the reason Columbus sailed to try to go the long way around to India is the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Ottoman Turks, Muslims, took control of the land routes from Europe over to East Asia.
00:12:33
Speaker
That's why Europeans hit the seas, was to try to find a way around that. In any event, the popes thought that by arranging geopolitics, by settling disputes, perhaps in this case by getting close to the rising Spanish powers, they could indeed have a significant influence on the course of European power politics again. So that was part of their motive for wanting to get involved in this.
Intercatra: Spiritual or Political?
00:13:00
Speaker
Pat, about a third of the way through the book, you write, quote, interketera was not understood only as a spiritual mandate. For many, conquering souls and conquering societies went hand in hand, end quote. You all argue that this connection between these two goals was implicit within the document, leaving much room for interpretation. I'm wondering if you can tell us about how different groups went on to engage in that interpretation.
00:13:23
Speaker
First, for a little bit of background, one of the responses that historians and some Catholics have made to the recent criticisms of Interketra is that this was never a political document at all. That it had nothing to do with conquest, with the empire, with colonization. That instead, all that it did was authorize Spain to have the main responsibility for evangelizing.
00:13:49
Speaker
the newly discovered lands, that it was meant to say that Spanish missionaries should be the ones to spread the Catholic faith among the peoples that Columbus and other explorers had discovered. That is oversimplifying things quite a bit. What we see from looking at documents before Intercheterra that dealt with land disputes in Europe, in Africa, in other places,
00:14:17
Speaker
And certainly, what we see from those who interpreted interketura early on, on the Spanish side, was that, yes, they believed that the Pope's sanctioning here was for the spread of Christianity, but that that would go hand in hand with Spain establishing, with Spaniards, establishing political control over the societies that they had found.
00:14:43
Speaker
that it was by removing indigenous rulers and bringing in Spanish overseers, and it was by defeating pagan armies, that that would open the way for evangelization. So it's not enough in historical context, in its original historical context, to say that intercatero was just a church regulation about evangelization.
00:15:09
Speaker
There was a lot of thinking going back to the Middle Ages that talked about how indirect coercion. So the church never accepted the idea that you could be forced to become a Christian at sword point or gunpoint. That was seen as incompatible with the free consent to becoming Christian or converting. That was spiritually necessary.
00:15:33
Speaker
But there were thinkers in the Middle Ages, including a significant pope I write about quite a bit, Pope Innocent, who taught that indirect coercion was allowed, that removing obstacles to conversion by suppressing pagan religious practices, stopping human sacrifices, removing political authorities could be options for Christian evangelization.
00:15:57
Speaker
So when the Pope Alexander issued intercatera, certainly Spaniards understood this as authorizing a political mission as well. Now that legacy would be debated over the century and a half that followed and that's what the second half of the book is all about.
00:16:15
Speaker
There were Spaniards who took that understanding quite straightforwardly and said that Spain or Castile had been granted the authority to spread Christianity. That required conquest. And so that was why Spain got to rule over its colonies. There were others who questioned that and came to, as a result of that, question this entire idea of indirect coercion altogether.
00:16:42
Speaker
Bartolome de las Casas, who I write a chapter about in the book, says that even if the text, even if maybe some of the history around intercatera could be interpreted that way, that would contradict the gospel, that Jesus Christ's mission in the world and by extension the church's mission in the world has to be one of peaceful witness. And so this document must not be read in a way that authorizes conquest, rather it has to be read only
00:17:11
Speaker
as authorizing a spiritual mission conducted peacefully with Spain's rulers providing military protection for converts and for missions, but not going on the offensive in any way against indigenous rulers.
Debates on Papal Authority and World Order
00:17:25
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So there's a rich and lively history of debate.
00:17:28
Speaker
There are debates about whether the Pope even has the authority within geopolitics to assign different lands to different people and to remove non-Christian rulers from their offices. That's something that Francisco de Vittoria, who's a major scholastic theologian, ends up writing about.
00:17:47
Speaker
He doesn't reject empire altogether. He instead comes up with ideas about natural law and humanitarian intervention that he uses as reasoning for why Spain gets to have its colonies. But nevertheless, that document over and over and over again throughout all of these debates is a major touchstone. It's something that people are concerned with. It's something that people are citing, disagreeing about.
00:18:14
Speaker
And it winds up, as a result of these debates, generating so much intellectual energy around these questions of what is world order? How does Christianity spread? What sorts of rights do people have? So it does wind up being this fascinating for such a short document, such a fascinating centerpiece of so many major debates that, in a lot of ways, are still continuing today.
00:18:38
Speaker
I know that John's going to ask you about Bartolomé de las Casas, but I wanted to go back to thinking about different ways in which thinkers and theologians of this time are thinking about political power or ways to assert political power. And you write in the book about this recruitmento, and I want to say anything about that as a kind of alternative, is what I understood, to intercatera.
00:19:09
Speaker
So, alternative is not quite how I would phrase it. Going back to the Middle Ages, within Spanish culture, if you were going to make a demand on somebody, you had to produce a statement called a recurimiento, or a requirement.
00:19:26
Speaker
What that meant was it was basically a matter of due process and serving somebody with notice of what you demanded of them. So if you had a dispute, you and at least one witness or a notary or somebody would go out, read out your demands, and say that if they weren't satisfied, then you would either fight or bring some sort of legal action, something. This was a matter of procedural due process. It was required under canon law, the idea that people had to have notice if you were going to bring a legal action against them.
00:19:56
Speaker
that became part of early Spain's law of war. If you were going to make war on, say, another kingdom around a local lord, you needed to issue a recurimiento. In time,
00:20:12
Speaker
As early Spanish criticism of Interchezera really picked up in the early 1500s, as Spaniards started to doubt that the Pope could just hand over a whole bunch of people to Spanish rule, and by the way, it's remarkable that its Spaniards themselves were having this existential debate about whether or not they were allowed to do this.
00:20:35
Speaker
That's a kind of debate that you don't see happening in the same way among other European imperial powers later on. You don't see these sort of deep searching questions of, is what we are doing legitimate in the first place?
Moral Debates on Spanish Conquests
00:20:48
Speaker
Nevertheless, as these early Spanish critiques pick up, there is an official response. The emperor calls together a number of scholars and says, I need you to examine the conditions on which we are expanding our rule in the world.
00:21:03
Speaker
and to help give it guidance in a way that will make it morally safe. This intervention is so important to Emperor Charles V. He actually holds up the fleets, the Armadas, from going forth. He actually says that no more conquests will be authorized until some of these questions are resolved.
00:21:27
Speaker
I actually think I might have just gotten my timeline wrong there. That wouldn't be Charles V. I think this would still be Ferdinand. I would need to double check on that. Spain actually halts its expansion for a while in order to allow theologians and jurists to debate and discuss the terms on which imperial expansion can happen in a way that's morally sound. That is a remarkable process.
00:21:55
Speaker
Out of that come two major thinkers. One is De Paz and the other is Palacios Rubios. Paz recognizes that indigenous people have rights
00:22:09
Speaker
Looking at canon law, looking at Roman legal precedent, so on and so forth, he says that indigenous political societies have the right to decide their own rulers. Indigenous peoples are by nature free. So there has to be not an end to empire, but some sort of a reason beyond just the Pope said so for why Spain, why Spaniards get to come in and occupy these lands.
00:22:35
Speaker
That's where Palacios Rubios comes in. Paz is a theologian. Palacios Rubios is a jurist. Palacios Rubios comes up with a Rachimert.
00:22:46
Speaker
Helacios Rubios comes up with a reccirimiento for the New World. He takes the ideas in intercheterra, the idea that there is this Pope who exists by God's sanction, who has control over the world, and who in turn has the authority to give that to those whom he pleases.
00:23:09
Speaker
who handed over indigenous lands to Spain. Those are all ideas that are found in some way or another in Interquetera. Palacios Rubios writes out a Recchirimiento and says that if Spaniards present these statements, make these demands for submission on indigenous peoples,
00:23:30
Speaker
and the indigenous peoples refused to accept the Pope's authority, and by extension, the authority of the Spaniards over them, then the Spaniards have a legitimate reason to go to war. This may sound highly convoluted. It is very legally formalistic. It is something that a number of Spaniards criticize over the decades that follow.
00:23:53
Speaker
Palacios Rubios understood what he was doing as a way of offering due process and a real choice to indigenous peoples. Rather than simply saying that Spain could go forth and invade, there had to be this step where this Recciri Miento was read and indigenous people had a choice of do we peacefully submit or are we authorizing our own conquest by defiance.
00:24:20
Speaker
Palacios Arubios had never been to the New World. He did not know the conditions on the ground. That is, in fact, part of why he was trusted. He didn't have any financial interests in any of the colonies, unlike a lot of the other thinkers that I write about, and certainly then a lot of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, his absence from things on the ground means that that document worked out about as well as you might imagine it would.
00:24:46
Speaker
Palacios Rubios said that it had to be read by translators in indigenous languages, that indigenous readers had to understand it, and then had to make a real choice as to whether or not to submit. Instead, what you see is abuses chronicled like people shouting them from their ships as they approached the land, people waiting until nighttime and then whispering them as they begin their charge on villages,
00:25:10
Speaker
having Indians go who don't speak the same tribal languages and give the Rekirimiento to other Indians, and occasionally it just gets thrown out entirely. One notary who had seen it read to indigenous people, noted that they were shackled, that they didn't understand what was being said, that neither did the people who were reading it because they weren't educated enough to know what any of these concepts
Bartolome de las Casas' Influence
00:25:33
Speaker
meant.
00:25:33
Speaker
And that when the indigenous listeners failed to immediately answer, the Spaniards began whipping them and telling them to move along quicker. The recumetri miento turned intercatera, this legal document from a pope decades before, into the basis for a script that was read over and over again right as the Spanish arrived to take control of indigenous lands.
00:26:00
Speaker
What a strange journey for this document to have gone from, again, being a formulaic legal recitation to being a cry for war. Matt, you mentioned earlier about Bartolome de las Casas and his role in later interpretations of intercatra. I wonder if you could tell our listeners a bit more about de las Casas and his place in the story too.
00:26:25
Speaker
Las Casas' father was a prominent Spaniard who was on one of Columbus' early journeys. Las Casas as a boy was actually there when Columbus and his crew returned from their second voyage in Spain. Las Casas grew up in a household with an American Indian page.
00:26:43
Speaker
a servant that his father had acquired. Las Casas relocated eventually himself to the New World and became a landowner. He was ordained as a priest and he held native slaves. Slavery had begun and earnest by this point and was going to be becoming an important part of the new economy. Las Casas was mostly untroubled by this.
00:27:06
Speaker
In fact, there were Dominicans who protested much sooner than he did the conditions of slavery and excommunicated slaveholders who refused to change their ways. Las Casas briefly was denied the sacraments by them. So Las Casas was enjoying the life of a Spanish elite within the colonial milieu. Something changed.
00:27:31
Speaker
Las Casas one day a few years after that was preparing a homily and came across a passage of scripture talking about how wicked sacrifices are those that are given with goods that are ill-got. He turned that over in his heart for several days and in his later writings said he realized everything that had been done to the Indians up to that point was wrong.
00:27:59
Speaker
He underwent a profound conversion. He, in fact, joined the Dominican Order at that point and spent the rest of his life as an ardent advocate for indigenous rights. He began by criticizing slavery and physical abuse. He moved on to criticizing dispossession of Indians from their property.
00:28:19
Speaker
He started to call for the inclusion of indigenous peoples within the new political structures. And then by the 1560s, when Inca nobles led an uprising against Spanish rule,
00:28:34
Speaker
Las Casas said that the Spanish were aggressors, that as such, they had no right to defend themselves, that the best they could do would be to run and hide, and that the throne for Peru belonged rightly to the heirs of the Inca Kingdom. He ended up endorsing full-fledged indigenous independence, political independence, in a way that very, very few other people did during his era. Las Casas is a fascinating figure.
00:29:03
Speaker
His words ended up having a pretty significant impact on the ground. Colonial officials, not too long after some of his interventions, noted that friars were beginning to hide Indians from tax collectors, saying that tax collectors had no authority to extract money from them. That Las Casas was being cited by Indians who arrived inside of royal courts in Mexico City and said, most of the country still belongs to us. And we have this Dominican here to prove it.
00:29:33
Speaker
Las Casas fought tirelessly and ended up back in Spain, lobbying a number of times to the throne, as well as the papacy, for change. His last known letter to a pope, to the new Pope Pius V, asked the pope to reject indirect coercion, to excommunicate anyone who engaged in unjust wars, and to revoke any authority for Spain to be occupying the new world.
00:30:04
Speaker
That letter did not receive a favorable response and Las Casas died not long after. Las Casas has drawn a lot of attention in recent decades. For a long time, he was written off as a major contributor to the black legend.
00:30:22
Speaker
the idea that Spain was a uniquely violent, barbaric, theocratic, irrational empire. Part of that was because Las Casas wrote a number of works in his lifetime, castigating his fellow Spaniards as murderers and as involved in what we would now consider genocide.
00:30:41
Speaker
Historically, some of those accounts were exaggerated. Nevertheless, he really went for the heart of the Spanish enterprise in a way that made a lot of people very uncomfortable. It wasn't until the mid-20th century that scholars started to see Las Casas not as a turncoat to his country who slandered its good name but instead as an early champion of human rights.
00:31:02
Speaker
And as somebody who really understood universal rights including to self-determination in a way that would later become very, very influential in world history.
00:31:12
Speaker
So there's a lot of debate about Las Casas nowadays. Some folks have noticed that early on, in some of his early calls to abolish Indian slavery, he called for the importation of Africans as a substitute source of labor. Las Casas wrote later that he believed, based on accounts he had been given, that African slaves have been seized in legitimate wars, but that he had come to regret that once he acquired a further understanding of the facts.
00:31:39
Speaker
and that he did not know how he would be able to stand before God with that responsibility on his conscience. Matt, well, it's been great to talk with you this afternoon.
Legacy and Modern Interpretation of Intercatra
00:31:49
Speaker
We just have one last question for you, which is, who is this book for?
00:31:54
Speaker
I think this book would be of interest to people who have curiosity about the history of Latin America, of course, and about the early modern period. Folks who are engaged or interested in these dialogues between the Catholic Church and indigenous communities, as well as folks who are just interested in the question of the empire and colonialism.
00:32:16
Speaker
This is a centuries-long dispute about one of the key aspects of the ideologies that drove imperialism. I early on in the book reject the idea that there's any one doctrine of discovery that all Europeans used as they went out into the world and seized things.
00:32:35
Speaker
Part of my book talks about how English and United States critics of inter-Ketra often miss that England rejected it from the get-go. It didn't benefit them. They challenged it from the very start and said it was ridiculous that a pope could assign these kinds of controls to other countries.
00:32:55
Speaker
France rejected this too, even though they were Catholic. One of the French kings actually said he would want to see Adam's last will and testament before he accepted that the Pope had the authority to arrange geopolitics. So to put everything back on the door of the papacy, at least of Pope Alexander VI, for what happened in Australia and South Africa and all these places, it's biting off more than the church needs to be able to chew.
00:33:22
Speaker
But, on the flip side of things, Catholics have sometimes been too quick to say. Intercatera was nothing. Didn't mean anything. It was supplanted a year later by a treaty. It was a spiritual document, and that's it. And so it has gotten outlandish attention. And that's not really true either. For Spain, for Spaniards, for 150 years, this was a really important document. This was something that Spaniards kept coming back to and pointing to as the reason why they had their empires.
00:33:50
Speaker
If that story interests you or if you've picked up on any of the modern disputes about these things, this is a really interesting story. It's also an interesting story about how ideas subtly find their ways into power politics and sometimes can wind up having quite an impact, often in unexpected ways.
00:34:09
Speaker
Those are our main questions. Is there anything that you want our listeners to know that we didn't get a chance to cover? Yeah, I think there's just one more thing that I want to discuss. Latin American imperialism and colonialism are just complicated stories, and I try to be very careful throughout this book not to just say that all imperialism is bad. Unlike some other empires, unlike some modern states,
00:34:34
Speaker
The Spanish Empire was also a place where race and ethnicity existed in complicated ways. So a fuller appreciation of the context of Latin America. It's not something that we can get into in the next couple of minutes. But I do think it's an important caveat here. I'm not saying in this book that Las Casas' position is the only defensible one that every Spaniard should have thought.
00:35:03
Speaker
Certainly by the time he was talking about it, 70 years after they arrived in the New World, not long after that you had more and more of a Hispanic, Mestizo society emerging throughout the Americas. So the history that we have is the history that we have.
00:35:22
Speaker
It is important to recognize that we have an appreciation for self-determination of peoples that did not exist back then. It's important to realize that we believe in political inclusion across racial and ethnic lines in ways that people just didn't on the Spanish side back then. But in a lot of ways, the kinds of debates that I cover back then, even if they may sound very foreign, even if they involve papal claims and weird Latin,
00:35:49
Speaker
Oftentimes, the ideas aren't nearly as alien to issues that we still have going on today as we might think. And approaching that with a degree of nuance, I think, is really important. Matt, thank you so much for your time. It was great to have you on the show. From the Pope's hands to indigenous lands, Alexander VI in Spanish imperialism is out now from Braille Academic Press. We'll include a link in the show notes as well as a link to Matt's faculty page. And thanks for listening to this episode of the Interactions Podcast.