[s. E. DAWSON] IHE LINES OF DEMARCATION 477 



Imnclred leagues from the Azores or other Portuguese islands. The 

 new discovery of necessity destroyed the value of all previous charts 

 and it was not in the least necessary that the Pope, or his lawyers, 

 should waste any portion of the very short time spent in preparing the 

 Bull in measuring off a hundred leagues upon a chart of any kind. As 

 for President White's "'flat disk,"' the very words of the Bull, "from the 

 " Arctic pole .to the Antarctic pole," preclude tlie notion. 



Again the popes were, in geographical questions, of necessity in 

 advance of their age ; for, during the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 

 turies, they' had been sending envoys — ^simple monks for the most 

 part — to the far east to the Tartar emperors, who had broken down the 

 barriers of Mohammedan exclusiveness, and in that way their knowledge 

 of the world had been greatly extended. Moreover, they favoured geo- 

 graphical study. The first translation of Ptolemy into Latin, in 1409, 

 was dedicated to Pope Alexander V. Pope Nicholas V. commanded the 

 first translation of Strabo, and the first printed edition was dedicated 

 to Pope Paul II. In 1478, the first complete edition of Ptolemy was 

 published and it was printed at Eonie and dedicated to Pope Sixtus IV. 

 ^Eneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius IL, wrote a work on cosmography 

 and a copy still exists with annotations on the margin in the admiral's 

 own handwriting. The Decades of Peter Martyr are mostly letters to 

 popes to keep them informed of the discoveries being made by Spanish 

 and Portuguese sailors. For these and many other reasons a question 

 of cosmography could, at that time, be decided better at Rome than 

 anywhere else. 



Whatever be their form, the true nature of these Bulls is an award 

 and not a donation ; for they are all drawn subject to a right by dis- 

 covery. The respective ''spheres of influence" of Spain and Portugal 

 were delimited ; but the grant to Spain is made "upon condition that 

 " no other Christian king or prince has actual possession of the islands 

 "tod mainlands found or that shall be found" before the Christmas 

 last past. Nor need the learned President take exception to the words, 

 " of our own free will and certain knowledge and in the plenitude of 

 " our apostolic power." There are similar words in all documents of 

 that nature by others than popes, for instance, in the patent and rati- 

 fication of privileges to Columbus (April 23, 1497), after stating in the 

 preamble that the power of the sovereigns is derived from " G-od alone, 

 " whose place they supply in temporal affairs," the grant reads "of our 

 " own propel- motion, certain knowledge and royal absolute power." 

 The wording is nearly identical and so is the material form ; for it is a 

 lay Bull, "sealed with a leaden seal hanging by threads of coloured silk." 

 The principle is the same in the wording of such documents even now. 



