[Sidenote: 1493. May 3. The Bull issued.]
A folio printed leaf in Gothic characters, of which the single copy sold in London in 1854 is said to be the only one known to bibliographers, made public to the world the famous Bull of Demarcation of Alexander VI., bearing date May 3, 1493. If one would believe Hakluyt, the Pope had been induced to do this act by his own option, rather than at the intercession of the Spanish monarchs. Under it, and a second bull of the day following, Spain was entitled to possess, "on condition of planting the Catholic faith," all lands not already occupied by Christian powers, west of a meridian drawn one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape de Verde Islands, evidently on the supposition that these two groups were in the same longitude, the fact being that the most westerly of the southern, and the most easterly of the northern, group possessed nearly the same meridian. Though Portugal was not mentioned in describing this line, it was understood that there was reserved to her the same privilege easterly.
There was not as yet any consideration given to the division which this great circle meridian was likely to make on the other side of the globe, where Portugal was yet to be most interested. The Cape of Good Hope had not then been doubled, and the present effect of the division was to confine the Portuguese to an exploration of the western African coast and to adjacent islands. It will be observed that in the placing of this line the magnetic phenomena which Columbus had observed on his recent voyage were not forgotten, if the coincidence can be so interpreted. Humboldt suggests that it can.
To make a physical limit serve a political one was an obvious recourse at a time when the line of no variation was thought to be unique and of a true north and south direction; but within a century the observers found three other lines, as Acosta tells us in his _Historia Natural de las Indias_, in 1589; and there proved to be a persistent migration of these lines, all little suited to terrestrial demarcations. Roselly de Lorgues and the canonizers, however, having given to Columbus the planning of the line in his cell at Rabida, think, with a surprising prescience on his part, and with a very convenient obliviousness on their part, that he had chosen "precisely the only point of our planet which science would choose in our day,--a mysterious demarcation made by its omnipotent Creator," in sovereign disregard, unfortunately, of the laws of his own universe!