Treaty of Tordesillas

It was not for map at use at sea 'cause it was vast and very colorful, and this was a map to be stood around.

And then you look at where the flags are on this map, and you could see that, yes, the world is divided as per the paper line of demarcation from the Treaty of Tordesillas between the, the, the, the Portuguese east and the Spanish west.

But the flags all along what's now the North American seaboard were French.

And so I'm looking at a map that has f- what's now the USA and Canada given to France.

Um, so look, the, the New World, uh, we all know the story going back to Christopher Columbus and the, the discovery or accidental discovery, uh, of the New World.

Um, so essentially, there was a treaty in fourteen ninety-four, the Treaty of Tordesillas, that splits the world, and the, the Pope oversees this treaty, uh, which, uh, gives Spain all of the territory, uh, to the west of a, a line and, uh, s- Portugal all of the territory to the east.

They didn't know how far, uh, Brazil stuck out, which meant that the eastern part of, uh, what would become Brazil was in the Portuguese territory, and obviously Portugal, uh, stuck rigorously, uh, to the line in, in staking its claim to Brazil.

But the rest of the Americas effectively were, were donated, uh, in this agreement to Spain, and Spain went about vigorously trying to, um, you know, seek out riches and, and claim territory a-across the Americas.

Well, there's so many surprising stories in Portuguese history, and I think that there's a lot of our history that is not known.

At least, I think there is, and it always has been, a narrative in the western part of the world, because it dates back to the fact that we divided the world with Spain, with the Tordesillas Treaty in 1494.

So Spain would go West and Portugal would go East.

So the Western part of the world, of course, it had more eyes or knows a little bit more about the Spanish empire with the Portuguese empire.

We're going to partition the Arctic between...

It's going to be Treaty of Tordesillas II.

Arctic Boogaloo.

Right.

Dee's real problem was a legal one, a problem around how the world had been divided up until that point.

In 1493 and 1494, a papal bull and then the Treaty of Tordesillas had drawn a line down the Atlantic and split the newly found world between Spain and Portugal.

England had been left out, and if Elizabeth wanted colonies, she needed a title older than Spain's, at least in theory.

Dee is usually credited with putting the phrase British Empire into print for the first time, in his General and Rare Memorials of 1577.

This was the exact sort of thing he needed to prove that Geoffrey of Monmouth hadn't just been making things up.

This was the evidence he needed to present to Queen Elizabeth in her court to justify why England had a right to the New World.

Under this formulation, the Treaty of Tordesillas was potentially null and void because it assumed that the lands of the New World had never been reached by Christian powers before.

But here was documentary proof that King Arthur and his men had settled the North Pole, Greenland, and areas west of Greenland as well.

over that kind of trade and the discovery by Europeans of all of these new places.

They have to come up with the Treaty of Tordesillas, which is a very important treaty, which is kind of bonkers, in which they just divide the world up between them.

And they draw a line from pole to pole that sort of, it depends, they kind of shift it a little bit, but it cuts through Brazil, if you can imagine that, the sort of line going down.

And they say anything on the... anything let me get this right on the west of it is for Portugal anything on the east of it is Spanish anything we discover that's new or maybe I'm getting that wrong no I'm getting the wrong way around so anything to the to the west is for Spain and the east is for Portugal so So that keeps them at peace.

Colonial Mexico was part of the Spanish Empire and administered by the Viceroyalty of New Spain.

The Spanish Crown claimed all of the Western Hemisphere west of the line established between Spain and Portugal by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, discussed in detail in episodes 27, 28, and 29.

This included all of North America.

The Viceroyalty of New Spain had jurisdiction over Spain's northern empire in the Americas.