«INTER CAETERA». – Thus begin two bulls issued by Alexander VI on 3 and 4 May 1493: the first called the donation bull, the second the division bull (antedated, actually dispatched at the beginning of June). Christopher Columbus, having returned from his first voyage across the ocean, in March of that year notified King John II of Portugal of his discovery. The same notification was made on 13 March in Barcelona to Ferdinand V and Isabella of Spain. A conflict arose: since Nicholas V had granted the Portuguese monarchs exclusive rights to lands discovered beyond Cape Bojador (*Romanus Pontifex*, 8 January 1454), Ferdinand, to forestall any Portuguese claim, requested Alexander VI in April 1493 to grant Spain the same exclusivity for its discoveries. The Pope, interested in the evangelization of those lands and unable to achieve it himself, and wishing also to preserve the friendship of the Catholic Monarchs, issued the first *Inter Caetera*, which reached Barcelona on 28 May. However, its imprecision regarding the division of zones proved unsatisfactory; hence the Catholic Monarchs requested a more explicit bull, and thus the second *Inter Caetera* was drawn up.
In this document, almost identical in wording to the first, a line of demarcation running from pole to pole, passing 100 leagues west of the Azores, assigned the western lands to Spain and the eastern to Portugal. John II did not accept this, and after various diplomatic negotiations agreed to move the line 370 leagues east of the Azores (*Treaty of Tordesillas*, 7 June 1494). Moreover, both bulls exhort the Catholic Monarchs to send missionaries to the new lands.
The explanations offered by many canonists regarding the donation bull maintain that the papal act is an exercise of the Pope’s universal temporal monarchy, according to the medieval doctrine of Hostiensis (d. 1271), Alvaro Pelayo (d. 1354), and others: the infidels, after Christ, were deprived of political dominion and true right of property, and the Pope, as their depository, transferred these rights to the Spanish monarchs. Thus argued Juan Palacio Rubio (16th cent.), Matías de Paz (d. 1517), and Juan Solórzano Pereira (1575–1655).
The theologians, following St Thomas Aquinas and Cajetan, attributed to the infidels true and absolute rights of public and private dominion, and in the *Inter Caetera* bulls saw an exercise of the Pope’s indirect temporal power, assigning to Spain zones for evangelization and trade. Thus argued John Mair (1469–1550), Bartolomé de las Casas (1479–1563), Francisco de Vitoria (1486–1546), Domingo de Soto (1494–1570), Domingo Báñez (1528–1604), and Gregorio de Valencia (1551–1603).
The clause in the *Inter Caetera* bulls exhorting the monarchs to send missionaries gave rise to certain anticanonical conclusions: the Pope, supreme pastor *in potentia* even over the infidels, would have constituted the monarchs as his delegates or vicars, even in spiritual matters, in the West Indies; missionaries sent by them would have ministerial faculties independent of any local ordinary. This theory, elaborated by religious (Alfonso de la Veracruz [1524–84], Augustinian, and Juan Focher [d. 1572], Franciscan), passed to the Council of the Indies (c. 1622), to secular counsellors (García Pérez de Araciel, 1624), and was developed in a regalist sense by Solórzano Pereira (1629–39).
Its practical application was disapproved by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (*Propaganda Fide*) in 1634; the doctrine was implicitly prohibited by the Holy Office (*S. Uffizio*) in 1642. This decree did not take effect in Spain, and the theory was treated alongside Gallican and Febronian ideas in the 18th century. Philip V, Charles III, and Isabella II declared themselves papal vicars in the Indies. Dalmacio Vélez Sarsfield (1854) proposed that the presidents of the new South American republics might be considered papal vicars in the missions within their districts. These theories, however, did not impede the development of the Church in Central and South America.