Christianity Crosses the Atlantic

All the accounts used here are European, written for patrons at home; the islanders speak in them only as Europeans reported their words. Returning from his first voyage in February 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote that the people he had met knew “no sect, nor idolatry”, believed that power and goodness were in the sky, and were well disposed to become Christians; in the same letter he offered the Spanish sovereigns slaves, to be taken from among “idolaters” (Columbus, Letter to Santángel pp. 266–271). On 4 May Alexander VI issued at Rome the bull Inter caetera. On the report of the Spanish envoys, and “out of the fullness of our apostolic power”, he gave, granted and assigned to the kings of Castile all islands and mainlands found or to be found to the west and south of a line drawn from pole to pole a hundred leagues beyond the Azores and Cape Verde, so far as no Christian prince already held them. He commanded them to send God-fearing and learned men to instruct the inhabitants in the Catholic faith (Alexander VI, Inter Caetera (4 May 1493)).

A second fleet of seventeen ships left Cadiz that September (Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo decade 1, book 1). Finding the men left on Hispaniola dead, Columbus chose a new site further along the coast, where the fleet’s physician describes a town being built (Chanca, Letter pp. 300–308). He calls it Marta, a name that his editor says is found nowhere else (Chanca, Letter pp. 300–308); the friar Ramón Pané calls it Isabella (Pané, Antiquities of the Indians pp. 27–29). Peter Martyr, writing at the Spanish court a few months later, says that a church was put up within days and that mass was celebrated there on the feast of the Three Kings (Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo decade 1, book 2). The physician noted that the islanders copied the Spaniards at prayer and said they wished to be Christians, yet kept in their houses figures that he took for idols (Chanca, Letter pp. 309–310).

Pané, a friar of the order of St Jerome, stayed when other friars went home. At Columbus’s order he lived for nearly two years with the cacique Guarionex and wrote down what he learned of the islanders’ beliefs. Guarionex, he reports, learned the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed and then turned away, persuaded by other chiefs that the Christians were wicked men who had taken their lands by force (Pané, Antiquities of the Indians pp. 27–29). When men sent by Guarionex took the images from the friars’ chapel and buried them, the governor, Bartholomew Columbus, had the men burned (Pané, Antiquities of the Indians pp. 29–30). The first islander baptised, Pané says, was Guaticaua, christened John Matthew, on St Matthew’s day 1496 (Pané, Antiquities of the Indians pp. 27–29) (Pané, Antiquities of the Indians pp. 30–31); and he concludes that with some of the people force and punishment are needed (Pané, Antiquities of the Indians pp. 30–31).

The papal grant came to be used as a title to conquest. The Requerimiento, a proclamation for Spanish commanders to read before attacking, told its hearers that a pope had made a “donation” of their lands to Castile and threatened war and slavery if they did not submit (Requerimiento). In 2023 two departments of the Holy See declared that the “doctrine of discovery”, which some scholars trace to bulls such as Inter caetera, “is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church”; that the bulls did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples and were manipulated by colonial powers to justify immoral acts; and that the Church repudiates concepts that fail to recognise those rights (Holy See, Joint Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery (2023) §§5–7).