In his essay, The Great (Linguistic) Reshuffle, Rahul Sanghi made the compelling case for how there is currently a wealth of innovation and ideas we cannot access because the important conversations are occurring in a language we do not understand.
That, in itself, is a good reason to engage with Sanghi’s piece, yet I was more fascinated by the historical odyssey he took to arrive at that conclusion.
So, we rewind to 15th century Europe and the fall of the Byzantine Empire:
“In 1494, still nursing its wounds from the Hundred Years’ War, Europe found itself caught in a geographical vice grip. To the East, the Ottoman Empire cast a long shadow. Its scimitars still gleamed from the conquest of Constantinople just four decades earlier. The Ottoman Turks represented an overland blockade to the spice-laden lands of the East Indies, choking off the arteries of commerce that had long fed European coffers. To the West, the vast, untamed Atlantic stretched to the horizon and beyond, a liquid wall that had rebuffed explorers for centuries.“
It was within this context that Spain and Portugal emerged as the next European powers. For their part, the Portuguese had spent the better part of 100 years perfecting the art of sea exploration. Leveraging this new skill, they were able to find a route to Asia by going around Africa – effectively bypassing the Ottomans. Lagos in present day Nigeria still goes by the same name these Portuguese explorers had called their trading post in that region back in the late 15th Century (‘Lagos’ = ‘Lakes’ in Portuguese).
On the other hand, Spain as a singular political unit, was born when the Catholic kingdoms of Castile and Aragon on the Iberian Peninsula were unified by the marriage of Isabella I to Ferdinand II. With this consolidation of power also came the colonial desire to find new territories to conquer and expand into. So, when Christopher Columbus came along with the claim that it was possible to reach Asia by sailing West, it didn’t take much convincing for the Spanish monarchy to financially back his travels.
The initial goals of Spain and Portugal had been to find a way around the Ottoman Empire to arrive at Asia. What they discovered in the process, however, were new people, untapped resources and new territories – sub-Saharan Africa, in the case of Portugal, and the Americas, in the case of Spain.
But what was to stop Portugal from turning their attention to the Americas or Spain from doing the same with Africa? The solution was simple:
“Enter Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borgia in Spain. As head of the Catholic Church, he wielded enormous influence (and as a Spaniard, he was not immune to the politics of his homeland). His solution to stave off the brewing crisis was audacious in its simplicity: a line drawn on a map, running north to south, 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands…Spain received rights to lands west of the line, effectively granting them most of the Americas. Portugal secured an exclusive route around Africa, to the Middle East, India, and beyond.”
To me, this is even more mind bending than the land-splitting that would later play out during Western Europe’s Scramble for Africa in the 19th century. At least, then, there were representatives from Belgium, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal and Spain negotiating among themselves the borders of their respective colonies. What Pope Alexander VI did, however, is very different. Here we have a single man who was powerful and influential enough to draw a line in a map and literally assign continents to Spain and Portugal!1
- Spain and Portugal eventually negotiated directly with each other and moved the original line that Pope Alexander VI had drawn further to the west ↩︎
