ir persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors … and to convert them to his and their use and profit.” In 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued another bull, the Romanus Pontifex, to King Alfonso — and extended to all Catholic monarchies — the right of “discovery” and seizure of all lands that were not inhabited by Catholics. It also encouraged the enslavement of the non-Christian inhabitants of all stolen lands. Thus, when Christopher Columbus landed on Guanahani island in 1492, he performed a ceremony to “take possession” of the land in the name of the king and queen of Spain, as ordained by the church. Columbus was also following church doctrine when he wrote in his personal diary about his intentions for the Indigenous people he encountered by claiming, “I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased.”
A year later, in 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter Caetera, which gave Spain the Americas, while Africa and India were allotted to Portugal (and later, land that would become Brazil, as well), for the purposes of colonization and to convert and enslave the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. Inter Caetera also justified the enslavement of Africans. Inter Caetera established the Law of Nations (also known as the Law of Christendom), a papal and thus legal decree stating that “one Christian nation did not have the right to establish dominion over lands previously dominated by another Christian nation.”
All together these papal decrees (between 1095-1493), originating from the Crusades, served as a bedrock for the ideology of white supremacy as tied to the establishment of international law under the Doctrine of Discovery (or the Doctrine of Christian Discovery). This ideological doctrine was fundamental in the creation of sovereign rights in settler colonial nation-states and the legalization of European claims to own, occupy, colonize and exploit the continent of Africa and the entire Western Hemisphere, condemning Indigenous peoples to a subhuman status in domestic and international politics. The Doctrine of Discovery advanced the structural foundations (political/legal, cultural and economic) for the transatlantic slave trade and the genocidal policies and practices of colonization across the globe.
With the “discovery” of the Americas, the imperialist nations of England and France followed the new doctrine of discovery and quickly used it to claim rights and powers of first discovery in North America. In 1496, England’s King Henry VII issued a Royal Charter, which commissioned an expedition led by John Cabot — in the name of England — “to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians … to conquer, occupy and possess whatsoever such towns, castles, cities and islands by them.” Based on Cabot’s explorations, England laid claim to his “discoveries” from Newfoundland to Virginia. France contested England’s claims, and declared first discovery rights of ownership and sovereignty over North America. At the time, both countries were Catholic, making them cautious to violate papal bulls. It would not be until the end of the 16th century when France, England and the Netherlands were able to compete with Spain and Portugal for supremacy over the lands and bodies of Indigenous peoples on a global scale.
By the late 16th century, England freed itself from papal rule and attached the name and principles of the 1095 papal bull Terra Nullius to Queen Elizabeth I’s definition of discovery rights, which required the occupancy and actual possession by Europeans of non-Christian lands as crucial elements of a discovery claim.
Thereafter England proclaimed that only Christian nations could discover and claim territory in the Americas (and later Australia), conditioned on the establishment of permanent settlements that cultivated the land. According to the Encyclopedia of Public International Law, 