Romanus Pontifex: the papal bull that gave Portugal the African coast

The long Latin letter is dated at St Peter's in Rome on 8 January 1455. At its foot is the name of Pietro da Noceto, the private secretary of Pope Nicholas V. The parchment measures 57 by 84 centimetres. A lead seal hangs from it on a cord of silk, and the clerks of the apostolic chamber, the papal treasury, noted on it that it had been registered.2 sources2 sources

The letter took its name from its first two words, Romanus Pontifex, “the Roman pontiff”. Its business was Africa. It praised Prince Henry of Portugal for sending caravels down the African coast for a quarter of a century and declared that the lands, harbours and seas his men had reached belonged to the king of Portugal, his successors and Henry, and to no one else, for ever.1 source1 source

The pope wanted the whole of Christendom to know. A copy was to be fixed to the doors of the church of Lisbon, and two months after that its sentences of excommunication would bind every offender as if each had been served in person. The archbishop of Lisbon and the bishops of Silves and Ceuta were told to denounce offenders in church on Sundays and feast days, when the most people were there.1 source1 source

Portugal's push into Africa began with war. In 1415 King João I took Ceuta, a Muslim port across the Strait of Gibraltar, and his son Henry, remembered as Henry the Navigator, spent the next decades sending ships south along the Atlantic coast. In 1434 one of them passed Cape Bojador, the point beyond which sailors had refused to go, and in 1441 the first captives and gold dust were brought home from beyond it. The voyages and Henry's part in them are told in Lisboeta's article on his death in 1460.2 sources2 sources

Castile, Portugal's larger neighbour, wanted the same prizes. The two crowns had quarrelled over the Canary Islands for a century. In 1344 a French admiral who promised to convert the islands was crowned “Prince of Fortunia” at the papal court in Avignon, but he never took possession. Papal bulls favoured one side and then the other, and the case was argued before the Council of Basel in 1435. Castile's kings also claimed Africa itself, as heirs of the Visigothic kings, and taxed goods brought from Guinea.2 sources2 sources

By 1454 the Guinea trade was worth fighting over. On 10 April that year King Juan II of Castile wrote to Afonso V of Portugal demanding the return of an Andalusian caravel, which a Portuguese captain had seized within a league of Cádiz on its way home from Guinea, and his envoys threatened war unless Portugal gave up the “conquest” of Barbary and Guinea. Afonso replied that the conquest was his. Juan II died that July, and his successor, Enrique IV, was soon negotiating to marry Afonso's sister.1 source1 source

Afonso turned to the pope. He stood high in Nicholas V's favour: after the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople in 1453, he was the only western king who seriously prepared to answer the pope's call for a crusade, and in April 1454 Nicholas sent him the consecrated golden rose, a mark of special papal favour. The bull says it was issued “motu proprio”, on the pope's own initiative, but its American editor Frances Davenport judged that it was “doubtless” issued at Afonso's request.1 source1 source

Romanus Pontifex built on an earlier bull. In 1443 Pope Eugenius IV had stayed neutral between Portugal and Castile. Then, on 18 June 1452, Nicholas V issued Dum Diversas, which gave Afonso V general powers to attack non-Christians, enslave them and take their lands and goods. It named no particular place.1 source1 source

Romanus Pontifex repeats the grant of 1452 in its own words before extending it to Africa. This is the clause that licensed enslavement:1 source1 source

The bull opens with a history of the Portuguese enterprise as Lisbon wished it told. Henry had peopled “certain solitary islands in the ocean sea” with Christians and built churches there. For 25 years he had sent caravels south to find a sea route to “the Indians who are said to worship the name of Christ”, hoping to recruit them against the Muslims. His ships had reached Guinea and the mouth of a great river thought to be the Nile.1 source1 source

Then it turns to profit and rivals. Portugal had banned anyone from sailing to these coasts without a licence and a payment of tribute, but foreigners “induced by covetousness” might go anyway, sell iron, arms and timber to the infidels, or teach them navigation. To prevent wars between Christians, the pope settled the matter in Portugal's favour.1 source1 source

In the middle of its praise for Henry, the bull mentions the people his ships were carrying north. It counts their conversion as one of the enterprise's achievements.1 source1 source

Some of those people had been landed at Lagos, in the Algarve, on 8 August 1444. Six caravels brought back 235 captives seized on the coast and islands beyond Bojador, and at dawn they were led into a field outside the town gate to be divided into five lots, one of them Henry's. The only description comes from Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the royal chronicler, who finished his Chronicle of Guinea in 1453 for Afonso V.1 source1 source

Zurara's pity is real, but so is his purpose. In the same chapter he ranks the captives by the colour of their skin, and he ends by praising Henry for saving their souls. In the next he insists that he never saw one of them put in irons, that they never tried to escape and that their owners treated them almost as family. By 1448, he wrote, 927 captives had been brought to Portugal.2 sources2 sources

The ground at Lagos tells a harsher story. In 2009, building work for an underground car park at the Vale da Gafaria, outside the old walls, uncovered a rubbish dump holding the remains of 158 people, men and women, adults and children. They had been thrown into the town's rubbish and covered over, many in atypical positions, and three had their hands or feet bound. The dump was used between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries; one skeleton was radiocarbon dated to between 1420 and 1480, and DNA from two pointed to West African or Bantu-speaking ancestry.2 sources2 sources

A century later, enslaved Africans were part of daily life in Lisbon. The Flemish scholar Clenardus wrote in 1535 that it was hard to find a house in the city without at least one enslaved woman. In 1551 Cristóvão Rodrigues de Oliveira, in his survey of the city, found “a hundred thousand souls” in the city's 18,000 households, “including nine thousand nine hundred and fifty slaves” (translated from Portuguese): about one person in ten.1 source1 source

Romanus Pontifex did not create this trade, and the vast majority of those people were taken to the Americas long after 1455. But by Eltis's estimate, ships he counts as Portuguese carried more Africans across the Atlantic than those of any other nation, about 5.1 million people, and they were still carrying more than 1.2 million between 1826 and 1850. Vos and Kananoja describe the trade as carried by Portuguese and Brazilian vessels.2 sources2 sources

Nicholas V did not live long after sealing the bull: his successor, the Spaniard Calixtus III, took office on 8 April 1455. Afonso and Henry asked him to confirm it. On 13 March 1456 the bull Inter caetera repeated Romanus Pontifex word for word and gave the Order of Christ, which Henry governed, spiritual jurisdiction over the lands from Bojador through the whole of Guinea and beyond, “as far as to the Indians”. Historians have long argued over whether that meant the subjects of Prester John, the legendary Christian king, or the peoples of India.1 source1 source

Castile kept contesting Guinea until a war over its own throne ended in the Treaty of Alcáçovas of 4 September 1479. Castile left Guinea, Madeira, the Azores and Cape Verde to Portugal, and Portugal recognised the Canaries as Castilian. The pope confirmed the deal in 1481.2 sources2 sources

Then Columbus came back. Driven into the Tagus by storms, he was received by João II on 9 March 1493, and the king said the new lands fell within his lordship of Guinea. The Spanish pope Alexander VI ruled for Castile, and his Inter caetera of 4 May 1493 gave it every land west of a line 100 leagues beyond the Azores and Cape Verde. João II persuaded Castile to move it: at Tordesillas on 7 June 1494 the two crowns agreed a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands.2 sources2 sources

In 1823 the Supreme Court of the United States heard a dispute over land in Illinois. The plaintiffs held deeds bought in 1773 and 1775 from chiefs of the Illinois and Piankeshaw nations; the defendant, William M'Intosh, held a grant from the United States. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled for M'Intosh. Indians could occupy their land, he wrote, but could not sell it to whomever they pleased, because European discovery had given the ultimate title to the discovering power.1 source1 source

Marshall's opinion does not mention Romanus Pontifex or any other bull. Its one reference to the papacy is the remark that Spain “did not rest her title solely on the grant of the Pope”, followed by “Portugal sustained her claim to the Brazils by the same title”, meaning discovery. He traced the principle mainly through English charters, starting with the 1496 commission to the Cabots to claim countries “then unknown to all Christian people”. Some scholars argue that this idea, that discovery by Christians overrode the rights of the people already there, runs back to the bulls of 1452, 1455 and 1493.2 sources2 sources

The doctrine is not only history. In 2005, in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinion for the Court, quoting earlier rulings, noted in a footnote that under the “doctrine of discovery” title to Indian lands had vested first in the discovering European nation and later in the original states and the United States.1 source1 source

On 30 March 2023, eight months after Pope Francis's penitential visit to Canada, two Vatican departments, the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development, published a joint statement on the doctrine of discovery. It said that “certain scholars” had found its basis in papal documents “such as” Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex and Inter caetera.2 sources2 sources

The statement admitted that the bulls “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples”. It said competing colonial powers had manipulated their contents to justify “immoral acts against indigenous peoples”, at times without opposition from church authorities, and it asked for pardon. It quoted Pope Paul III's bull Sublimis Deus of 1537, which said such peoples must not “be in any way enslaved”. It repudiated the doctrine but did not revoke the bulls themselves.2 sources2 sources

The statement spoke of indigenous peoples and their land. It does not mention Africans. Slavery comes up only in its claim that popes had condemned it and in the lines from Sublimis Deus, so the people Romanus Pontifex described as “taken by force” go unnamed. The bull itself is still in Lisbon, in the national archive of the Torre do Tombo, under its old shelfmark: Bulas, maço 7, n.º 29.3 sources3 sources