Spain and Portugal split the unexplored world along a line
On this day · 7 June 1494
On June 7, 1494, two crowns drew an invisible meridian through the Atlantic and calmly divided lands they had never seen.
On June 7, 1494, envoys of Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, settling a bitter quarrel over the territories opened up by Columbus’s voyages. Rather than fight, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Castile-Aragon and King John II of Portugal agreed to draw a line.
The boundary ran from pole to pole, 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Everything newly found to the east of it would belong to Portugal; everything to the west, to Spain. With a stroke, a planet largely unknown to either kingdom was parceled out between them.
Two courts carved up half the globe along a meridian no sailor had ever crossed.
The consequences were enormous and lopsided. The line tucked the bulge of Brazil into Portugal’s half, which is why Brazilians speak Portuguese while most of the Americas speaks Spanish. The original treaties survive in archives in Seville and Lisbon and are now inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.
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