204 W. E. Curtis — Pre-Columbian, Vatican Documents. 



porated into and peace preserved between the Christian king- 

 doms of Spain and Portugal. 



"TAe Sending of Bishops and. Missionaries to the New World. 



" In these grants of lands newly discovered or to be discovered 

 Alexander VI and his predecessors emphatically insisted on the 

 duty of Christian kings to cooperate, by all means under their 

 control, in the conversion of the inhabitants of such lands; in 

 fact, such cooperation was a clearly implied condition and con- 

 sideration of the grants. The evidence appears insufficient to 

 supj)ort a positive assertion that on his first voyage Columbus 

 was accompanied by a priest; but it is a plain fact that for the 

 second expedition, in 1493, Ferdinand and Isabella, as well as 

 Alexander VI, solicitously provided missionaries, not only for 

 the spiritual well-being of the Spaniards, but also and princi- 

 pally for the conversion of the natives. 



" Bernard Boil, greatly esteemed for his saintly life and for 

 his great ability in the management of ecclesiastical and also of 

 political affairs, offered himself for this mission, the first apostle 

 who, after Columbus' discover}^, went to the new world. Till 

 1492 he was a Benedictine monk, or hermit, at Montserrat; but 

 at the time of his mission to the lately discovered islands — that 

 is to say, at least from September 22, 1492, to December 8, 1497 — 

 he belonged to the order of the Minimi, Avhich shortly before had 

 been established by Saint Francis of Paul. In 1488 he returned 

 to the Benedictine order and became abbot of Cuxa. The copyist 

 of the letter of Alexander IV to Boil made, therefore, a ver}'' 

 excusable mistake in Avriting ' minorum ' instead of ' mini- 

 morum,' in consequence of which Ragnaldus, Wadding, and 

 many other writers assigned Boil to the Franciscan order. By 

 this letter of June 25, 1493, Alexander granted to Boil and his 

 twelve companions all the powers and privileges which could 

 aid to make their enterprise successful. Of these twelve com- 

 panions only Pedro de Asena and Fray Jorje are named. Pedro 

 de Asena is said to have celebrated the first mass in the new 

 world after it was discovered by Columbus. 



"As early as 1501, at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella, 

 Alexander took steps to provide bishojDS for the infant colonies 

 in America. In 1504 an archbishopric and two bishoprics were 

 erected at Tagusta, Magua, and Bay una, in Hispaniola (Haiti), 

 but through the operations of Ferdinand's well-known financial 



