Conquering Charts

Words themselves have histories. That is why I have undertaken the etymological parsing of the name of America with which we concluded our last chapter. Words are not simply history's innocent and lapidary components, and one needs suspect historiography's investment in the transparent instrumentality of language. One needs suspect our capacity to make words consubstantial with deeds, events, utterances, and even with the acts of recording these as history. In other words (as always, inevitably), we must be wary of rhetorical ideologies that are tantamount to such consubstantiation.

Duly suspicious and self-suspecting, I choose to read, whenever possible, the words of the historical personages themselves. And I do so as I would any verbal concatenation concocted by the actors to whose actions those words are meant to correspond. This is an obviously interested usage of words, which is another way of saying that we are dealing with rhetoric and rhetorical constructs and, inasmuch as these protagonists take their words to be identical with their acts or as their actions' faithful echoes, we are dealing with ideologies. Conversely, ideologies—philosophical, aesthetic,

political, economic—are forms of fiction insofar as they are ultimately rhetorical constructs. This is not to say that they do not have all kinds of worldly "real" and practical entailments, torsions, and repercussions. In fact, these are fictions that have proven as consequential, and often as deadly, as what we are given to privileging as "realities." In the case of the particular rhetorical ideologies that interest us here, that is, those entailed in the illusion that one's words and one's deeds are of a piece and are naturally coincident or congruent, these are to be read as forms of fiction precisely because of the problematic discrepancies that bedevil such natural congruence and continuity. These are fictions that history and historiography have compounded by multiplying or repeating the "record" in a manner conditioned by the same presumptions of naturality and coincidence. That is why to read history's stories is to read multiples of fictionality, whereas to read the stories of history and the stories of its elemental integers is to read the words that make history, to read them even as they unmake the monumentality and documentality of their scriptors or utterers. What comes undone for us in such reading is the very nature of the rhetorical, that is, the interested and self-interested usage, and the presumption of ideology, that is, the realization of usage as actuality. And in that undoing, we glimpse (however opaquely, for our own view and our own enablements are by no means pristine and unpresuming) something of the conditioning assumptions and motivating factors that go into the making of history in the making.

If, as we have seen, America's name argues lexically against the very ontology or existence of America, its foundations as a New World belatedly founded rest on the equally antithetical and slippery grounds of remonstrance and protestation. In other words, America, in addition to the antitheses in its name, is grounded in a covenant of contention, a rhetoric of grievance, a clamoring plaint, and prophetic pleading. From Columbus's epistles and Father Las Casas's vitriolic dicta to John Smith's apologia and William Bradford's purported plain style on Plymouth Plantation's Puritan provisions^[1] and, yet again, from Father Gerónimo de Mendieta's mendicant professions and Father Antonio de Vieira's Sebastianist promptings to John Winthrop's modeling

charity and Roger Williams's protesting "bloudy tenents," America's foundations are poured against the grain, plied on the adversative pinions of an anxious rhetoric. It is the rhetoric of prophetic injunction which, whether desperate or parenetic in register, takes the voice of Moses, when not of Jeremiah, as resonant precursor. And it is less than ironic that the itinerary of America's historical life as a project of Europe should begin simultaneously with yet another Exodus. Columbus's ships set sail as Spain's tribe of Israel rides the same tide of river and ebbing history to yet one more enforced wandering. Although Columbus does not remark the coincidence, his subsequent writings are steeped in the language and typological allegory of that simultaneity. As for the Puritan enterprise, of course, the tribal exodus there is explicitly articulated in Mosaic terms and prophetic rhetoric. As successor nation of divine predilection, the new chosen people will sanction their claims to a "virgin continent" in Testamental rhetoric and godly justification. From Pope Alexander's 4 May 1493 "donation" to Spain and Portugal of all lands discovered or to be discovered, and not already inhabited by Christians, to Queen Elizabeth's first patents, granted almost a century later, all lands not already duly baptized by Christian occupation are taken as promised lands for aeons held in escrow for God's new chosen people. Property and race and creed thus become reconfirmed as inalienable concomitants, as they still are by might and main even in our own time, most notably in the biblical land that begot the notion and willed its prophetic paradigm to America's posterity.

Our historical canon invariably has it that the New World was first "discovered" and that then it was "conquered," with the latter action occluded behind the rhetoric of more benign synonyms such as "pacified" and "populated" in Iberian America or "settled" and "planted" in the more northerly phase of the conquest. I should like to propose that the conquest of the New World, in fact, antedates its discovery, and that the conquest was already under way before any geographical encounter. Though modest, this is not an original proposal. And we may have been preempted in this regard by the very first reference to the New

World in a book to be printed in English, itself, more than likely, belated already. I refer to Sebastian Brant's Shyp of folys, in whose 1509 English version Alexandre Barclay, the translator, renders Brant's reference to a New World as "founde by maryners and crafty governours."^[2] "Maryners and crafty governours" in this primal remark may be a plural allusion to the first "founder," made legion by those who followed his chartered privileges and patented crusade. The "maryners" could well be read as the multiply refracted "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" in supernumerary throngs streaming to virgin shores. And as for "crafty governours," the would-be "viceroy and governor" of the "Oceanic Yndies, discovered and to be discovered," spawned a myriad cavalcade after his own crafty example.

There is something undeniably arid in the matter-of-fact clauses of charters, patents, capitulations, and maritime contracts between European heads of state and enterprising visionaries, or visionary entrepreneurs of salvationist conviction. And yet, as I read these documents, starting with the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe (17 April 1492) that launched the Genoese mariner on the "enterprise of the Indies," I find a compelling series of remarkable presumptions that resist being remarked by a seeming inevitability in the ruse of their matter-of-factness. Matter-of-factness is, of course, a most repellent rhetorical shield against remarking the remarkable. Taking the matter at hand as fact and the facts as pro forma givens, matter-of-factness naturalizes the unthinkable into unthought assumption. Foregone suppositions, thus, take on an ordinariness that immunizes the questionable as much against afterthought as it was against forethought. This unassailable ground serves, of course, as the natural habit and habitat of ideology and its enfranchising charters. What is ideologically warranted thus lies on the safe side of any warrant's jurisdiction. The self-serving empowerment, in other words, not only need not be questioned, but it precludes the very idea of its being served a warrant by any logic or sense of justice other than the one that already sanctions its privilege on perfectly "natural grounds." From there on, one proceeds with any enterprise unproblematically; one fills one's sails and galleons as naturally as breath-

ing. What is naturally tenable in mind's reason and in conviction's sanctity becomes obtainable in practice with unfettered naturalness. Galvanized by the righteousness of divine election and godly privilege, such unrestrained naturality overlooks any obstacle that might thwart its goals or mitigate its claims. Obliviousness to difficulty is an emphatic enablement, its force sufficient to vouchsafe the most extraordinary ventures. Columbus's brazenness in this regard is matched only by the righteous presumptions of the Western European royal courts. They are empowered by nothing less than the conviction that the rest of the world was their own solely by dint of exercise of their rightful claims. And should the world deem otherwise, institutionally sanctioned means empowered their agents to press those claims, naturally. A guileful perspicuity into the impertinence of such ideology may well be encoded in a work I've already mentioned: the satirist Sebastian Brant's 1494 German title that Albrecht Diirer illustrated and which in 1509 Alexandre Barclay rendered as Shyp of folys . In this sense, we can better appreciate the allusion to a New World as "founde by maryners and crafty governours." "Folys" or not, it is in the nature of ideologies not only to color reality but also to effect it, to realize the most improvident phantasmagoria as providential imperative and inexorable reality. So compelling are the linkages between ideological conviction and its worldly realization that in the case of Columbus certain historians of eminence have been persuaded that the Genoese mariner "discovered" the New World in 1492 for the second time, having already realized the undertaking he so relentlessly and, in the end, persuasively peddled to European royalty.^[3]

The charter granted to Columbus on 17 April 1492 by Isabel of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon is the literal prototype, the paradigm and locus classicus of its genre. Columbus, we might say, holds the patent on New World patents and licenses to conquer. The circumstances in that Andalusian spring are strangely consistent with the language, fundamental character, and ideological underpinnings that gird the primal charter. The place is a military camp. From there, Santa Fe de la Vega, the Catholic

monarchs launched their final, and finally successful, assault on Moorish Granada, thus culminating the seven-hundred-year-long crusade of "reconquest." The "Infidel" capitulates on 2 January 1492. Their Highnesses have been waiting the preparation of secure and appropriate quarters for themselves in the Alhambra. The importunate Columbus has been waiting Their Majesties' royal pleasure since that legendary January evening when, at the end of his tether, he stamped off, headed for France with his proposal, but was overtaken by Isabel's emissary and convinced to return. Finally, now, two and a half months later, the monarchs and Columbus agree on the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe. They would be amplified and further formalized on 30 April. The site of what we could call the charter's "discursive formation" is a war camp of conquest under the banner of, and literally named after, the Holy Faith–Santa Fe de la Vega. The agreement was countersigned by the State Secretary of Aragon, Juan de Coloma. Eighteen days earlier, he had countersigned the order for the expulsion of the Jews. His own mother was Jewish.

Patently inscribed in the circumstances engendering the charter, then, is the unmistakable conjunction of two concomitant ideologies: the conquering or "missionary" imperatives of the Church Militant and the imperial dreams of the Universal Church, both ultimately invested with a prophetic narrative of the ecclesia triumphans, the Church Triumphant and its messianic eschatology. This providential conjunction was not lost on Pope Alexander VI who makes overt reference to the "Most Catholic Monarchs'" zeal and accomplishment in his "donation" of 4 May 1493 that granted them the Indies. Nor was the coincidence of the reconquest, expulsion, and discovery overlooked by Abraham Zacuto. The Jewish scientist's astronomical treatise, Almanach Perpetuum, would save Columbus's life in 1504 on the island of Jamaica when it enabled the shipwrecked Admiral at the mercy of the Indians to predict a lunar eclipse, thereby awing his "hosts." Zacuto notes the coincidences of 1492 in his Sefer Yuhasin (Book of Genealogies).^[4] In the preamble to the journal of his first voyage, addressed to the Catholic mon-

archs, Columbus himself, a contemporary of Zacuto, also makes passing note of these coincidences, though he errs as far as dates are concerned.

I should state emphatically that I do not aim to invest religion, and Christian dogma in particular, as sole determinant or as overdetermining factor in the history of the New World's conquest. Instead of that reduction, I simply wish to maintain that Christianity and its providential rendering of human time and worldly events purvey the ideological givens that make imperial taking a natural right needing no further justification. In other words, prophetic history and its apocalyptic rhetoric serve as ideological shield for intricate and mixed motives for Europe's project in the New World, and in the rest of the world for that matter. This form of ideological self-empowerment, by the way, may not be unique to Western Europe and Christianity. But the fact is, as far as the New World is concerned, Western Europe with its dominant mythology is the particular agency involved in this historical context.

The text of the paradigmatic charter unmistakably falls into the category of "writing that conquers," writing that engages in the "production of places" that it takes as its object, to use Michel de Certeau's turn of phrase from a related context.^[5] One could say, despite the risk of punning, that the Capitulaciones come about under heady circumstances. In the capitulation of the last "Infidel" stronghold, followed by the order of the expulsion of the Jews, the Catholic monarchs climax their Holy War. Now, universally Christian, Spain shifts the horizon of universality and the ends of its crusade from its Iberian frontiers toward plus ultra .

What becomes patently clear in the language, in the very grammatical structure of the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe is that the plus ultra shifts from a conjectural hypothesis to a future perfect of a subjunctive case, which in Spanish is identical to the imperative mode. The promissory inevitabilities of a "New World" imperatively enjoined resonate in the inventive and invocative discourse of official and juridical injunction. The charter makes patent the existence of "islands and main lands" in the generative

formations of its language and, in doing so, assigns proprietary and jurisdictional authority for that terrain to its would-be, more accurately, its "will-have-been" discoverer and conqueror as "discoverer and conqueror." The 30 April 1492 amplified and formalized version of the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe is barely one folio in length, recto and verso. Within that textual economy, the most recurrent leitmotif consists of a dual-verb phrase: "descobrir y ganar," to discover and conquer. The construct occurs seven times, a symbolic redundancy for some numerologists, no doubt. In the first instance, the verbal binary occurs in the infinitive, undeclined: "Por quanto vos, Christoval Colon, vades por nuestro mandado a descobrir y ganar . . . [Forasmuch as you, Christopher Columbus, are going by our command to discover and conquer . . .]."^[6] In the second instance, the verbal formation shifts to the future conditional subjunctive: "[E] se espera que, con la ayuda de Dios, se descubriran e ganaran algunas de las dichas yslas e tierra firme en la dicha mar Oçeana por vuestra mano e yndustria . . . [And it is hoped that, with God's help, some of the said islands and mainland in the said Ocean sea should be discovered and conquered by your hand and labors . . .]." The original infinitive, now having been conjugated into wishful injunction, passes in the third instance into the perfect tense of an implied future subsequent to an implicit consummation of the desired outcome: "[V]os, el dicho Christoval Colon, despues que ayades descubierto e ganado las dichas yslas e tierra firme en la dicha mar Oçeana o qualesquier dellas . . . [You, Christopher Columbus, after having discovered and conquered said islands and mainland in said Ocean sea or, any of them . . .]." The desired goals having been perfected in attainment and in grammar's perfect tense, the verbal scansion now passes into the sure inevitability of an apodictic future: "[Q]ue seades nuestro almirante de las dichas yslas e tierra firme que asi descubrierdes e ganardes, e seades nuestro almirante e viso-rrey e governador en ellas . . . [You shall be [imperative] our admiral of said islands and mainland you shall thus discover and conquer, and you shall be our admiral and viceroy in them . . .]." This particular conjugation occurs twice more, in the next instance,

and in the seventh and final one. The sixth occurrence takes the discovery and conquest as a given, thus transforming the perfect tense of the third instance into the pluperfect, rendering the other world into passive participle, into object predicate already subjected to the project of discovery and conquest, already within the grasp and mastery of both the grammatical and the imperial subjects: "[S]eyendo por vos descubiertas e ganadas las dichas islas e tierra firme en la dicha mar Oçeana . . . [Said islands and mainland in said Ocean sea having been discovered and conquered by you . . .]."

Any Trinitarian numerologist, or any calculator of Genesis (and doubtlessly s/he would be very much in the tradition of Columbus), could compute this grammatical schema as the symmetry of a typological calculus whereby the third instance of the perfect case subsumes and becomes transmogrified into the pluperfect of the sixth, and thereby deduce a divine arithmetic ruled by a providential abacus. Who is to deny such wonder-working reckoning on such "emergent occasions"? But I leave that task to the subtlety of more devout hermeneutics. What I do wish to remark through what, for some, may seem a tedious, grammatical parsing is the official creation of the New World on the septenary scheme of this active verbal construct of "discover and conquer," a creation animated as much in the official deed of the charter as in the grammatical deeds of its language. As we see repeatedly, the New World is a product of the collusion of deed and language, of actions and rhetorical infrastructures, of praxes and their ideological scaffoldings. In this primal charter for America, the grammatical case of the biverbal enterprise ("discover and conquer"), beginning as it does in the indefiniteness of the infinitive, and ending as it must in the inexorable surety of the compelling (because prophetic) future, subtends the rhetorical force of its statutory patent and purveys the ideological givens of an appropriative presumption whose enablements are so authorized by conviction as to sanction their truth unquestionably. The validity of the resultant claims thus not only become immune to the charge of being (pre-)suppositious, but the truth of those claims is rendered apodictic, that is, their legitimacy becomes

incontrovertibly granted. The grammatical, rhetorical, and logical enablement forms and performs the discursive ideology, the programmatic discourse that will easily translate the legitimacy of such granting of validity from the legitimacy of the juridical and statutory to the legitimacy of a territorial deed, that is, conquest. In other words, the passage from the authority of the charter grant to the deed of the land grant is already ideologically preconditioned, patently naturalized even before the discursively conceived and juridically engendered land is actually discovered. And the privileges granted to Columbus are unmistakably clear on what is meant by this process and its practical implications. Columbus may have been fully cognizant of the amazing nature of these implications. Their Catholic Majesties too quickly came to appreciate what all this entailed. That is why the Genoese mariner produced copy after copy and pressed for repeated reconfirmations of his chartered privileges. That is why, too, the Spanish monarchs and their successors saw fit to curtail, if not outright rescind, what was originally granted in the Capitulaciones. We can now begin to understand what Brant and the English translator of his Shyp of folys meant by "maryners and crafty governours." The Catholic monarchs granted Columbus, in exchange for "discovering and conquering" islands and mainland in the Ocean sea, the privileges of their realms' Admiralty and the viceroyalty and governorship of territories to be discovered and conquered. Clearly, then, the would-be New World already has a governor even before its discovery and conquest outside of the charter that engendered it. What Their Highnesses capitulate to Columbus is not merely a patent for exploratory activity, or even for a mercantile and exploitive venture, but a charter for the founding of an empire. Columbus's dismal failings as "viceroy and governor" and the monarchs' failure to take seriously the "maryners'" Admiralty gave a twist to the charted plot that furthered imperial goals all the more. And, in the final analysis, what becomes capitulated by the Capitulaciones is not the compensatory privilege bestowed upon Columbus but the territories "discovered and conquered" by him. At the end of the day, to capitulate, then, shifts in grammatical status and in worldly prac-

tice from an intransitive to a transitive verb. Thus recapitulated, the "enterprise of the Indies" renders the Oceanic territories into object predicate of the aptly, and now ironically, named charter that engendered them. Their capitulation was a foregone conclusion, and it was so written and charted that it should be. Columbus would invest his most assiduous energies in the time between his historic accomplishment and his death in an attempt to dehypothesize, to actualize, the privileges granted him. The textual patent had made those privileges conditional upon the attainment of ends the text wrought as inexorable. Like the grammatical status of the document's titular verb ("capitulate"), the conditions of that hypothesis, paradoxically conditional and necessarily imperative at the same time, also shift. In that slide, the primary subject of the patent's sentence, Christopher Columbus, becomes elided, depersonalized into the diffuse and inescapably sticky web of imperial bureaucracy and state apparatus. Columbus, in this sense, set out as medieval knight-errant and premodern hero, only to return and be turned into instrumental agent of an elaborate imperial machine. His would-be Admiralty is significant in this regard and it is the one privilege that he most arduously fought to have reconfirmed, time and again, and the one that eluded him in substance if not in titular gesture and even, possibly, in royal jest. The privilege of Admiralty becomes capitulated, de facto, if not de jure, because its historical importance is empirically such that in its inclusiveness it subsumes even the office of "viceroy and governor."

In the title of Admiral, etymology and history, the history of a word and the words of history, collude once again, and the apperception of that collusion by human agency changes, if it does not set, the course of history. Our most immediate lesson in this plot consists of the unavoidable fact that the project of Columbus and the Spanish monarchs was, indeed, one of search and dominate, of discover and conquer, find and appropriate, and is not simply and innocuously a mission of exploration and discovery. The key term here is "Admiral," an Arabic term of war adopted into the Spanish language by Alfonso X, also called the Wise. Its root etymon lies in the verb amara, "he commanded,"

and in the noun amir, "commander," known to us by the more familiar and Hispanisized spelling of emir . In his Siete Partidas, King Alfonso glosses the title of Admiral as pertaining to a "cabdiello de todos los que van en los navios para facer guerra sobre mar [Commander of all who go in ships to make war at sea]."^[7] King Alfonso had created two Admiralties, one for the Mediterranean and one for the Atlantic. Spanish historians quibble on the matter of who first indisputably and identifiably held the title. Some claim it was Ruy López de Mendoza in 1254, others assign it to Ramón Bonifaz. The office does not become clearly defined until the fourteenth century with the Trastámara dynasty conferring the title on one of its family members, Alfonso Enríquez, in 1405. Although Columbus and the Catholic monarchs had a general idea of the prestige attached to the title, it is less than likely that either party had complete appreciation of the legal rights and the extent of statutory privileges it entailed. Simply put, it automatically gave Columbus civil and criminal jurisdiction over the entire sea-borne empire, to be discovered and conquered, over all ports and territories touched by the Ocean Sea; over the entire fleet system; over the value of one-third of all maritime cargo, one-third of all income from the fleet's activities, and one-third of the royal fifth accruing from private expeditions. In sum, Columbus's jurisdiction would extend over an empire larger than that of the monarchs, and his entitlements would amount to fifty-five and eight-tenths percent of the empire's maritime income.^[8] Although he did not die poor, by comparison, of course, Columbus died destitute.

The charter of privileges granted to Columbus is more notorious in the breach than in the honoring of its terms. The Capitulaciones, nonetheless, did set the precedent for what became known, particularly in Elizabethan England nearly a century later, as the "proprietary charter." This, in turn, would serve as the foundational paradigm for colonial governance in the New World. I say "colonial governance" advisedly. Because, what is unmistakably clear in such documents, starting with the capitulatory prototype, is a policy of intended conquest, colonization, and governance. An appropriative design, more accurately, pro-

prietary designs, then, prefigure the very "discoveries" in the language and declared ends of the charters and patents that produced the world to be appropriated. These charters, thus, are "proprietary" in the multiple senses of the term: they take the Roman praetorial precedent as model inasmuch as the privilege of governance is conferred upon the Imperial representative authorized by the charter; they grant the right of occupation, use, and capitalization of properties claimed to rightfully belong to the royal estate conferring the charter; finally, these charters are "proprietary" in the most literal and lexically self-sanctioning sense, that is, they precede, prefigure, and, in doing so, configure their putative object insofar as the Latin etymon pro-priare denotes a "going before." Thus, the appropriation of those charters' charted object and the realization of their proprietary designs are a foregone conclusion from the very beginning, from the graphic inception that writes a world to be claimed. And in this scribal project, scripture, of course, presides as ideological instrument and legitimating mechanism for the enterprise. Hence, the formulaic and, therefore, what passes us by as unquestionable and as unremarkable royal self-declaration that capitulates the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe, as it does all royal acts: "Ferdinand and Isabel by the Grace of God," and nearly a century later in England, "Elizabeth by the Grace of God." By the time of the Treaty of Tordesillas two years after the prototypical charter, when by papal blessing the world hemisphere is sliced into two parts, one for Spain and one for Portugal, propriety becomes a somewhat crowded family affair and the sanctioning invocation becomes reflective of a more elaborate menage and of the now concomitantly amplified exigencies of legitimation. Hence, the opening of the Treaty's second paragraph: "In the name of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three truly separate and distinct persons and only one divine essence. Be it manifest and known to all who shall see this public instrument that at the village of Tordesillas, on the seventh day of the month of June, in the year of the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, 1494 . . ."

Papal intercession in this instance is a conciliatory move designed to adjudicate conflicting imperial claims. It is also a reitera-

tive intervention aimed to recapitulate papal privilege. In this recapitulation, we glimpse the fundamental presumptions, the ideological scaffoldings, if you will, that authorize Western Europe's proprietary claims upon the rest of the world, in this case the New World. Often, the most ingenuous question might unmask the most disingenuous strategy. We should ask then, by what authority did the royal houses of Western Europe confer upon the charter holders proprietary rights to the land, culture, history, and bodies of another people? Christian cosmology and its prophetic narrative underwrite that authorization rhetorically and ideologically. Papal privilege is a key in the process, at least initially, but even when the figure of the Pope recedes and papal authority is eroded, say, in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the authorizing mechanisms, rhetorical and ideological, remain in tact and continue to be operative, as evidenced by the language of the English proprietary charters, a sample of which we shall examine in due course.

Two seminal studies of Medieval and Renaissance jurisprudence offer a glimpse into the enabling conditions of European privilege vis-à-vis non-European cultures. The first is by the erudite specialist on Medieval canonical law Walter Ullmann and the second by the encyclopedic philosopher Silvio A. Zavala. Ullmann's Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists^[9] and Zavala's Las instituciones jurídicas en la Conquista de América^[10] disclose, respectively, the fundamental ideological presuppositions that rendered the authority to grant proprietary charters such as the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe beyond questioning, and the juridical and philosophical debates that followed once worldly real entailments began to test and exacerbate canonical precepts as a result of their exercise in the New World. Used in conjunction, Ullmann's and Zavala's now classic works divulge the significance of the New World experience to European jurisprudence. That fascinating subject is peripheral to our immediate task. Ours is the more modest concern with the actual enablements themselves as articulated and exercised rather than with the juridical implications of their metamorphoses.

On 17 April 1492 Isabel and Ferdinand grant Columbus the

privileges of "discovery and conquest" and a number of offices in recognition of his projected achievements. One year later, on 4 May 1493, Pope Alexander VI, in an apostolic proclamation commonly referred to as the "Bull of Donation," grants all islands and mainlands "discovered and to be discovered one hundred leagues to the West and South of the Azores toward India" and already not occupied or held by any Christian king or prince as of Christmas of 1492 to the Catholic monarchs Isabel of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon. How so? By what right? And, for our purposes, how do these actions relate to the prophetic tradition we have been tracing thus far and to the historical explanations this tradition makes possible? A glimpse into the ideological complex that underwrites and legitimates these actions is to be had in the writings of the most virulent defender of the Indies and the most garrulous challenger of European hegemony in the sixteenth century. Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, notorious apologist for the Indies, would be the last place one would expect to find an apology or justification for the European enterprise in the New World. And yet, in Proposition Seven of the Dominican father's Treinta proposiciones muy jurídicas we encounter an articulate and telling summary of the most significant authorizing enablements for the enterprise that so often drew the good father's opprobrium and denunciation. Clearly, ideological and rhetorical determinants suffuse a culture's world view and practices so thoroughly that those conditions are operative and determinant in corroborative as well as in dissenting actions of a society's members. The grounds of contention and the grounds of collaboration, in other words, are patently and equally symptomatic of the ideological constellation that makes conformity and dissent possible. Here is the relevant passage from Father Las Casas's seventh juridical proposition: "Wisely, diligently, and justly, the Vicar of Christ by divine authority, in order to avoid confusion, divided and can divide among Christian princes the kingdoms and provinces of all infidels of whatever infidelity or sect they may be. Commanding to them and committing them to the spread of the holy faith, enlargement of the Universal Church and Christian religion, conversion and health of their [the Infidels']

souls as ultimate end."^[11] Lest any other Christian prince dispute this exclusive right in the New World granted by the Vicar of Christ to the Catholic monarchs in recognition of their Catholic exemplariness, noble deeds as conquerors of the Infidel and unifiers of Christendom in Spain, and for their initiative in supporting Columbus by rewarding him with the Admiralty of their kingdom, Proposition Sixteen reiterates the Holy See's apostolic authority to grant imperial monopolies and divide earthly jurisdictions: "With the same apostolic authority [divine authorization], the Holy See could prohibit all Christian kings under pain of excommunication, from going or sending to said Indies without license and authorization from the monarchs of Castille, and should they act to the contrary, they sin mortally and incur excommunication."^[12]

Embedded in Father Las Casas's juridical propositions is a great deal of canon law, historical precedent, and sanctioning supposition that Walter Ullmann unpacks for us in his Medieval Papalism . Simply put: "The pope as the vicar of God commanded the world, as if it were a tool in his hands: the pope, supported by the canonists, considered the world as his property to be disposed according to his will" (Ullmann, pp. 16–17). Moreover, "[t]he medieval world monarchy, to use a strong, though appropriate word, arrogated to itself the powers to command and issue binding decrees to all nations. And since it was the pope who was to play the role of world monarch, his dominion was not therefore restricted to the confines of Christendom, but extended to all members of all nations, wherever they might be found and whatever creed they might embrace. This is the gist of the canonistic doctrine relating to a world ruler" (Ullmann, p. 115). Ullmann is summarizing the key precept of thirteenth-century canonical jurisprudence that, by extension, became all-important in determining the special privilege of the Respublica Christiana vis-à-vis the Gentile, non-Christian world. The pivotal notion of a world emperor, of course, is the linchpin that hinges the canonical and the prophetic together, both traditions having as common base John 10:16 to which we have already alluded in a previous chapter: "And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring

them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd." This was certainly the key for the canonist Pope Innocent IV "from whom the main ideas of papal world government were derived," as Ullmann notes (pp. 119–120). And, in her unmatched erudite compendium on the prophetic tradition, Marjorie Reeves reminds us that "the reiterated motif of 'unum ovile sub uno pastore' . . . runs like a continuum through so many of the prophetic aspirations."^[13] And prophecy, which for Reeves never ceases to be "one of the bonds between medieval and Renaissance thought" (p. 508), is ultimately focused on the ecumenical hope of renovatio and unity: "This unites the medieval and Renaissance periods in an unexpected way. Renaissance people changed neither their patterns nor their expectations of history. Humanist hopes fastened eagerly on medieval symbols of the Golden Age and in a quite extraordinary way the new discoveries, new learning, new printing, new religious orders fell into the pattern as fulfillments of old expectations and portents of the new age dawning. . . . The most universal of these shared hopes—and to us, perhaps, the most poignant—was the 'unum ovile sub uno pastore"' (p. 507).

The poignancy felt by Reeves resides in the incongruity of a persistent imperial hope of ecumenical unity and world monarchy (intensified by what we saw in our last chapter as the plurimi pertransibut et multiplex scientia that Francis Bacon typologically descried in the Prophet Daniel for the Renaissance), at a time when the very same advancements of discovery, learning, printing, and religious intensities were leading to even further atomization of European culture and of the Respublica Christiana . As we have noted already, imperial activity abroad may well have proved a task of even greater urgency precisely because of sectarian and schismatic fragmentation in Europe. And this possibility of imperial expansion as compensatory gesture for an internal loss of cohesion and mastery may well explain, at least partially, the resurgence of papalist canonism and publicist fervor at the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth centuries when already the thirteenth-century reassertions of curialist claims and

prophetic fervor had betrayed a complex mixture of imperial hubris after the Crusades, and had evinced, too, a sense of disintegration, or certainly cracking, in the Universalist claims of a united Europe as a consequence of the "first Renaissance," as the thirteenth century is often called. What Reeves sees as "poignant" in a European context, in fact, proved fatal for non-European cultures of the New World that became the object of Western Europe's Universalist and monarchical dreams. Writing some twenty years earlier than Reeves in a Europe that had just endured the barbarous chastisements of a "universal dream" and a "final solution," Walter Ullmann did not fail to note, surely not without some poignancy, that "every political doctrine is prompted by actual circumstances or at least stimulated by the not too remote possibility of creating those circumstances which are favourable to the execution of the plan appearing under the cloak of an abstract theory" (p. 120). One need not be an initiate of dialectical materialist theory to perceive in the dubitative obliquity of Ullmann's observation an aptness for the New World project of Europe's enterprise of the Indies.

I would like to reiterate that I do not wish to reduce Western Europe's imperial expansion in the New World to a papalist plot underwritten by an ideological doctrine abetted in resurgent canonists and delirious prophets. As we have seen, and shall do so again, those who viewed papalism as symptomatic of Antichrist's reign, in fact, labored under the aegis of the same basic ideological sanction, even if in mirrored versions and rhetorical reversals. The fact is that the dominant "abstract theory" available to "cloak" imperial designs at the time of Europe's expansionist drive was the theory of Christian mythology and its prophetic narrative of world history. In this sense, just as Marjorie Reeves sees a continuity between Medieval and Renaissance expectations of history, Ullmann observes that the impetus that brought papalism and "world monarchy" to the fore in the thirteenth century extends beyond that beleaguered and ambitious time and well beyond the geographical and political frontiers that circumscribed its privilege and legitimacy:

The papalist claim to world monarchy was the direst result of the stimulus afforded by the crusades. . . . It is true that the crusades were primarily heralded as campaigns to take possession of land that was of greatest emotional importance to Western Christianity. . . . But the crusades had only whetted the appetite of the curialist political thinkers and of the papacy itself. It was soon discovered that by a logical elaboration of the ideas which first prompted the enterprise of the crusades, papal powers and supremacy could be extended so that it might, at least in theory, embrace the whole of what was known as the universe. In other words, the crusades were considered only a stepping stone in the direction of the eventual establishment of a fully fledged world government. (Ullmann, pp. 120–21)

I shall go on to refer to the theoretical principles the canonists educed to justify such a program in the context of the New World. But, for now, I believe it might be instructive for us to remember that, as I noted already, Christopher Columbus's "enterprise of the Indies" found its ideological baptism at the city walls of Baza in 1489 when he witnessed the papal delegation from the Holy City and, thereafter, became compulsive about reaffirming his goal to devote the proceeds of his trans-Oceanic venture to the reconquest of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple on Mt. Zion. In other words, Christopher Columbus's project is already invested with the ideological "cloak" of a crusade even before its royal authorization by the Catholic monarchs. We should remember, too, that for their part, the very Catholic monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand chartered and patented Columbus's enterprise in Their Highnesses' war camp and at the heels of their own successful crusade, as noted by Pope Alexander VI at the time of his "Donation" to them of the New World, discovered and to be discovered, in his bull Inter caetera on 4 May 1493. Which returns us to our original question, the "cur ita facies?"—an impossible query for it to have been entertained with regard to papal actions since, for the canonists, God's vicar could do no less than God ("papa est potest facere, quicquid Deus potest"). The question of why what was being done was being done at the time was not plausible, except in the perplexity of those most immediately affected by those actions, that is, the indigenous peoples of the New World,^[14] or those who felt pre-

empted from the material returns that accrued to the worldly praxes of these ideological investments.

For the most part, of course, the indigenous peoples' reactions to what befell them are conveyed by those whose actions affected them. Despoiled of their history, they were also muted in their language. What we do know generally of their own response we know through those who spoke for them after having expropriated their language and appropriated their human fate. Thus it is that a certain bachiller Martín Fernández de Enciso, who held fervently to the curialist position of papal privilege, divine right, and world monarchy, and who accompanied one of the first expeditions to the mainland (that of Pedrarías Dávila to Darién) as official and primal lector of the Requerimiento , a proclamation of the conquerors' rights and the Indians' obligations, wrote in his Suma Geografía (Seville, 1519) of two chiefs and their response to the conquerors' dicta: "as to what it [the proclamation] was saying, that there was but one God that reigned in heaven and on earth, it seemed quite fine to them, and that's how it should be; but [they felt] that the Pope was giving away what was not his, and that the King who was requesting it and taking it must have been a madman, since he was demanding what belonged to others."^[15] The merciless fate of the questioning chiefs is now history.

The English, particularly Elizabethan England, chafed implacably, and certainly made something of their exercised ambitions, as we shall see at greater length soon.^[16] The French monarch Francis I, too, expressed his vexed qualms: "The sun shines for me as much as for anyone else. I would like to see gladly the clause in Adam's testament by which I am excluded from the partitioning of the Globe,"^[17] a leading protestation that reinforces the ideological conditions that justify papal policy. For Francis I is not disputing the right of Christian Europe to appropriate the world. He questions rather his exclusion from the spoils of such a policy. The irked French king's reference to Adam's testament is not gratuitous, because the mythology of scripture is precisely the ground on which Western Europe's self-legitimation rests. In the juridical mind of the canonists, publicists, cosmographers, statesmen, and

stateswomen (tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando! ), proprietary claims on non-Christian cultures were naturally lawful claims and natural law was equivalent to divine law. Such rightful claims were only rightful if exercised under the aegis of the divinely sanctioned people, that is, people who were in the grace of God, the only creator and true lord of the world. Adam, the father of all mankind, the argument went, was created by God alone and Christ was his successor—"secundus Adam." The pope, as Christ's vicar, is "Adam's successor as the father of mankind." All mankind—for did not the Psalmist sign that "the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein; for he has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers" (Psalms 24:1–2)? Indeed, intoned Pope Innocent IV, whose preponderant authority on world government Ullmann underscores: " 'All men,' said Pope Innocent IV from whom the main ideas of papal government were derived, 'faithful and infidel alike are through their creation the sheep of Christ' " (Ullmann, pp. 119–120), which brings us full circle to the pastoral powers of John 10:16 and the single flock with a single shepherd. But what of the rival claims of other creation myths and their divine laws and competing natural authority? The suggestively named Pope Innocent and those who followed his conviction saw no problem with them at all: "Non enim ad paria debemus nobiscum judicare, cum ipsi sunt in errore, et nos in via veritatis [We must not put ourselves on the same level as those people, because they are in error, and we walk in the path of truth]."^[18]

Between David's Psalmist and John's pastoral, Innocent's ex cathedra proclamation presided (and in some quarters does still) steadfastly, de jure and de facto, over the Church Militant's campaign to move the world into conformity with the ideal and archetypal model prophetically pre-visioned as the Church Triumphant in all its heavenly promise for the faithful and the duly converted. A future with so much promise and authority so natural, ends so divine and means so righteous saw no reason to falter. And should the schoolmasters waver, there was always the Aristotle of the Metaphysics, book 12, and of the Politics, book 1, who in his reckoning, even before the true grace of divine light

illumined his way, was able to discern, in typological anticipation, that government in the universe is always hierarchical, whether in nature or in military orders, with lower creatures ruled by the higher, and all of them by one.

The translator of Aristotle's Politics into Latin happens to have been Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, whose treatise, Democrates Alter, on the just cause of war against the Indians proved too radical for the Spanish authorities to permit publication. Sepúlveda's virulence and influence, lack of publication notwithstanding, led to the famous Valladolid debate between himself and Bartolomé de Las Casas in 1550. Las Casas's line of argumentation coincided more with the officially articulated government policy on the status of the Indians. Nevertheless, it was Sepúlveda's unpublished premises that most often determined, or at least coincided, with actual practice rather than Las Casas's Christian charity or the royal decrees.^[19]

Francis I's protestation, however, has a more ambiguous and a more subtle differentiation encoded in its reference, and it is a distinction that becomes more telling in the actual conquest and in the notion of "justified war" against the Indians. The query by the French king echoes Matthew 5:45—"so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust." Matthew's exhortation about loving one's enemies was invoked by Pope Innocent IV to moderate the bellicosity of the Christian crusaders against the infidels and was an attempt on Innocent's part to check the more belligerent view of Henricus of Segusia, more commonly known by the name of his bishopric, Ostia, as Hostienses. He would have succeeded to the papacy, like Innocent twenty years earlier, had it not been for his advanced age and infirmities. As acute a canonist as Innocent, and as influential a jurist, Hostienses would serve as precedent for the canonical justification of the conquest of the New World. He would be identified expressly as such by Bartolomé de las Casas. Hostienses's more radical extension of Innocent's decrees on curial privilege and the Church's natural (divine) right over non-Christian peoples would find its way into the language of the notorious

Requerimiento, which we shall discuss shortly. As Ullmann notes, despite Innocent's moderation, founded on Matthew 5:45 that Francis I so cleverly and self-servingly invokes, Innocent's final conclusion was unequivocal and, rather than moderate the likes of Hostienses, furnished an authoritative precedent for juridical apologists of conquest and "just wars": "Sed bene tantum credimus, quod papa, qui est vicarius Christi, potestam habet, non tantum super Christianos, sed etiam super omnes infideles, cum enim Christus habuerit super omnes potestatem [But we believe nevertheless that the pope who is the vicar of Christ, has power not only over Christians, but also over all infidels, since Christ himself had power over everybody]."^[20] From this conclusion, it seemed only natural to Hostienses to infer, and for Spanish apologists of the right to conquer to concur, that all infidels ought to be subjected to the faithful ("Infidelis debent subjeci fidelibus"), and that the rulers of infidel nations could be left alone provided they recognize the dominance of the Church ("si dominum ecclesiae recognoscunt").^[21] These are the basic premises that underwrite the ideological assumptions of the conquest. And Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, in his already cited Historia de las Indias, chastises the likes of Palacios Rubios, author of the just-mentioned Requerimiento to which we shall now turn, for his fall "into the errors of Hostienses whose sectarian he was [en los errores del Ostiense, cuyo secuaz fue]."^[22]

Far from remaining, if ever they were, innocent word games of canonical pundits and casuistical clerics, these crusading terms of self-empowerment found their way, as ceremonial protocols or as ritualistic war cries, into royal courts and battlefields, or into both simultaneously when court and battle camp were one, as with Santa Fe de la Vega where the Spanish Catholic monarchs transited from one crusading front (Granada) to another ("islands and mainlands of the Ocean sea"). These enablements did indeed launch Columbus with rights to "discover and conquer" by way of juridical protocols termed Capitulaciones, charters, or patents. Soon after, in Columbus's steps would follow the same righteous enablements only now as ritualistic injunctions of war. These would become legalized into standard juridical language,

lest the wars of conquest be deemed unjust or unrighteous. This is the language of the Requerimiento, a proclamation to be solemnly read to all indigenous populations, affording them the opportunity to conform to its terms, whether they understood its language, much less its rationale, or not. It is compelling to see how much canonical law actually becomes articulated in the ultimata of this proclamation. This should not be surprising. The Requerimiento was the work of a distinguished royal jurist, Juan López de Palacios Rubios who, in 1513, felt that conquests needed to be more orderly than they had been until then. The actual title of the proclamation reads: "Notificación y requerimiento que se ha de hacer a los moradores de las islas e Tierra Firme de mar Océano que aún no están sujetos a Nuestro Señor [Notification and requirement to be made of the inhabitants of islands and mainland of the Ocean Sea who are as yet not subject to Our Lord]."^[23]

Like the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe of Columbus, the Requerimiento is a primal document. As such, it reveals the a priori suppositions of those who promulgate its terms. It discloses, too, the rhetorical strategies by which those convinced of the righteousness of their acts have come by their conviction. As sanctioning mechanism devised to legitimate motives, suppositions, practices, and claims, it becomes revelatory not only of its formative conditions but also betrays the expectations the instrument and its deployment are to yield. In other words, it reveals the presuppositions ends of its self-sanctioned means. It becomes telling of the ways and extent to which those carrying out this text's enablements presume on those to whom the "notification" is addressed and of whom its "requirement is made." I see, then, a direct continuity between the charter of the Capitulaciones that produced in its patent writing a world to be "discovered and conquered" and the Requerimiento as instrument that presided, as invocation, over the execution of the terms in Columbus's paradigmatic charter. The hypotheses of the Capitulaciones as proposal for a projected enterprise become actualized practice that transforms world-producing assumptions into self-reproducing presumptions. This self-reproduction resides in the fact

that the world-object upon which those theses presume is made identical with the interests of the presumers who now see multiples of themselves. In this identification, the target world becomes the proprietary object to be subsumed, to be taken over and taken in to the world and mythology of those who narrate and serve its "notice" and impose its requirements. The two-part proclamation, then, like the double verbal action of Columbus's "discover and conquer," is a two-step instrument of conquest. Its unequivocating duality consists, first, in notifying the target peoples of the "true history" of the world (scripture's providential and prophetic history as understood by canonists like Palacios Rubios and the tradition of Hostienses, down to the papal donation of the New World to the Spanish sovereigns) and, second, in requiring their accession to the terms and version of that world history, a mandated admission that automatically incorporates them as subjects of that cosmological order. This incorporation, in turn, constitutes a validation of the mandated world order that automatically translates into the invalidation of the indigenous peoples' own history and historical narratives. Not to accept the version of cosmology as rendered by the "notification" constitutes "legitimate grounds" for war, persecution, capture, expropriation, and enslavement:

Por ende, como mejor puedo vos ruego y requiero que entendáis bien ésto que os he dicho . . . y reconozcáis a la Iglesia por señora y superiora del universo mundo y al Sumo Pontífice llamado Papa, en su nombre, y al rey y a la reina nuestros señores, en su lugar, como superiores e señores y reyes desas Islas y Tierra Firme, por virtud de la dicha donación. . . . Si así lo hicierdes, haréis bien. . . . Si no lo hicierdes, o en ello dilación maliciosamente pusierdes, certificos que con la ayuda de Dios yo entraré poderosamente contra vosotros y vos haré guerra por todas las partes y maneras que yo pudiere, y vos sujetaré al yugo y obediencia de la Iglesia y de Sus Altezas, y tomaré vuestras personas y de vuestras mujeres e hijos y los haré esclavos . . . y protesto que las muertes y daños que de ello se recrecieren sean a vuestra culpa, y no de Su Alteza, ni mía, ni destos caballeros que conmigo vinieron . . .^[24]

[Thus, I beg and require you the best I can to understand what I have told you . . . and recognize the Church as mistress and superior of the

universe and the Holy Pontiff called Pope, in his own right, and the king and queen our lords, in his stead, as lords and masters and kings of these islands and mainland, by virtue of said donation . . . Should you do so, you will do well . . . Should you not, or should you maliciously delay, I assure you that with God's help I shall attack you forcefully and make war against you everywhere and every way I can, and I shall subjugate you to the yoke of obedience to the Church and their Highnesses, I shall capture you and your women and children and I shall enslave you . . . and I protest that the deaths and calamities that should ensue from this will be due to your own fault, and not His Highness's, or mine, or these gentlemen's who came with me . . .]

For the canonist Palacios Rubios, the Conquistador Pedrarías Dávila who first carried this proclamation on a conquering expedition to Darién, that most conquerable geography, as history continues to prove, that is the geographical umbilical cord of the Americas today called Panama, and for the bachiller Martín Fernández de Enciso, the first lector of the Requerimiento whose account of the Indian chiefs' reaction to the proclamation we cited earlier—for all of these Spaniards the choices offered by the dictum were perfectly clear and mutually exclusive. For the indigenous peoples it may have not been so, and history has proved that the options put to them were but the reversible coin of the same duplicitous face. The options, in fact, amounted to a choice between privation and deprivation, between being expropriated as a culture or being appropriated.

The Capitulaciones de Santa Fe produced a world to be "discovered and conquered." The Requerimiento actualized that hypothetical production by divulging its premises in their deployment as instrumentality, well beyond the heady, that is, capitulatory, symptoms of a mentality. If the Capitulaciones invented a world, to use a verb popularized by Edmundo O'Gorman and now much used,^[25] the Requerimiento not only instrumentalized and unmasked the hypotheses subtending that invention, but it also superimposed a history upon the world born of the Capitulaciones. The period between 1492 and 1513, of course, was not a lethic limbo. Columbus's four voyages and the frenetic activity of the many who followed in his wake obviously attest

otherwise, as Todorov's already-mentioned The Conquest of America and, more recently, Beatriz Pastor's fine treatise amply expatiate.^[26] Silvio Zavala, in the augmented edition of his Instituciones jurídicas cited above, admits to the existence of a more rudimentary version of the Requerimiento proclaimed by Alonso de Ojeda in his 1509 expedition.^[27] Nonetheless, the 1513 text by Palacios Rubios constitutes the most overt attempt to "order" the conquest and to lay out the terms of its legitimacy. In the process, the sanctioning suppositions of those terms are disclosed. The ideological cloak is revealed as a theological narrative whose representation of the cosmological order exhibits all the traits of the prophetic genre, from its imperious injunctions to its promised eschatology. As such, it expostulates not only a history that represents the past, but it narrates and decrees, as well, a history of the New World's inexorable future.

Like all injunctions dyed in the prophetic, the proclamations of the Requerimiento are ex cathedra . They evince the ineluctable urgency, imperative summons, and monitory exhortation of an ultimatum. Theoretically at any rate, the Requerimiento precedes and is intended to preclude action, provided those to whom it is directed accede to its terms. I say theoretically, because, poised as the deliverers of the proclamation were to carry out the sentence of noncompliance, their threat is nearly as aggressive as the threatened actions themselves. Less subtly, the delivery of the "notice and requirement" often followed the physical subjugation of the indigenous people instead of preceding it.^[28] The point of this confusion of canonical theory in discourse and conquering acts in practice is that those animated by the theoretical premises of this particular mythology see nothing purely theoretical in it. The enabling discourse is strictly procedural, a blueprint, and those empowered by its terms simply proceed, most literally. The juridical-theological proclamation becomes, in fact, a mechanism for self-absolution, an instrument that shifts the responsibility for baneful actions of conquest from the perpetrators to the victims and their "obduracy," as the concluding lines of the passage cited above make clear. As a certain Dominican friar from San Juan, Puerto Rico put it in his complaint against abuses of the Indians,

"mandó S. A. para la justificación de su real conciencia que ante todas cosas, antes que se hiciese le guerra a los indios, se les hiciese un requerimiento que acá ordenaron ciertos teólogos . . . [Your Highness, in order to justify your royal conscience before all things mandated that before war was made on the Indians, that a requirement be conveyed to them as ordered here by certain theologians]."^[29] Clearly, in the eyes of the Dominican friar, the "royal conscience" too was in need of assuaging before the acts of conquest perpetrated in its name.

The clamoring against the abuses of conquest became correspondingly stentorian. In 1537, Pope Paul III would, finally, concede the Indians' humanity in his ironically titled bull Sublimis Deus, thereby unleashing all manner of protestation that, in the final analysis, mooted the Holy Sees' belated recognition of the Indians as human.^[30] As the debates raged, the worldly and the other-worldly interests would move progressively to more polarized extremes, while official governmental efforts sought ways of breaching irreconcilable demands and vehement advocacies. The record of laws and decrees promulgated and periodically compiled is as long as they proved futile. For the most part, the official positions reflected the contending antitheses at large in the empire: laws and edicts echoed the humanitarian concerns of people like Las Casas; the actual execution of those regulations bent to accommodate the demands of curialist conservatives like Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and of economic interests. As court policy tacked through such turbulent waters, royal rhetoricians struggled to find a discourse of circumlocution appropriate to the circuitous and ever-deviating circumstances of their empire and its providential course. The rhetorical strategies that became necessary for the accommodation of such meandering are quite intricate, albeit somewhat transparent in their disingenuous ploys. I cite as example from King Philip II's "Decree on Discoveries and Pacifications Dated July 13, 1573":

Por justas causas y consideraciones conviene que en todas las capitulaciones que se hicieren para nuevos descubrimientos, se excuse esta palabra conquista, y en su lugar se use de las de pacificación y población, pues habiéndose de hacer con toda la paz y caridad, es

nuestra voluntad que aun este nombre, interpretado contra nuestra intención no ocasione ni dé color a lo capitulado para que se pueda hacer fuerza ni agravio a los Indios.^[31]

[For just causes and considerations it is suitable that in all charters contracted for new discoveries, this word "conquest" be dismissed and, in its stead, "pacification" and "population" be used. As such action should be carried out most peacefully and with utmost charity, it is our will that such a term [conquest] interpreted contrary to our intentions, not occasion nor color the capitulated terms so as to force or do harm to the Indians.]

While the rhetorical shift is toward a "kinder, gentler conquest," the ideological determinants do not change, though they do become complicated by the economic and jurisdictional interests of all those who shipped out under that ideology's cloak. As for the rhetorical ingenuity of the discourse masons at court, their clever synonyms for conquest would resonate serviceably through the centuries down to our own time. Certainly the euphemistic coinage of populating for conquest would become common coin in all its ambiguous benignity in the "deserts" of New England's wilderness, and even in the postcolonial era of Romanticism and nation-building in countries such as Argentina, the shibboleth for holding barbarity at bay would become "civilizar es poblar." As for pacification, the euphemism for countless acts of civilized barbarity committed in its name become all too common for the term not to prove as self-betraying as the word it replaced by royal decree, so much so that in New England's New World the verb would exchange its object predicate of populations for geographical terrain. Thus, the Godly Pilgrims and their progeny would pacify territories instead of Indians, wherever the territories and whoever the Indians might be.