The thirty papers, comprising the proceedings of a conference on the Treaty of Tordesillas held at Valladolid in September 1972, range from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, cover both Asia and America, and deal with antecedents of the treaty, its negotiation, implementation, consequences, and eventual repudiation. At this essentially Spanish conference there were four Portuguese participants (Armando Cortesão, Avelino Teixeira da Mota, Luís Mendonça de Albuquerque, and Fernando Castelo Branco) and one lone representative of the New World, Ursula Lamb, who contributed a slender piece (1:185-191) about a scheme to transplant spice-bearing plants from Asia to America.
Many of the articles are based on archival sources and contain fresh information, but others cover familiar ground. Cortesão (1:93-101) and Castelo-Branco (1:323-338) waste space on the fantasy of a pre-Columbian discovery of Brazil—a notion acidly defined as “pre-discovery” (2:197) by José Muñoz Pérez. Others raise more fruitful issues. Jesús María López Ruiz discusses some interesting, but abortive, Spanish plans for maintaining the Tordesillas frontier (1:357-383). Leandro Tormo Sanz stresses the differences between Brazilian Jesuit aldeias and Paraguayan Jesuit reducciones (2:90). Francisco de Solano emphasizes the large number of Spaniards in early Sao Paulo and suggests that the Paulista bandeira is related to the medieval Muslim razzia (2:124).
None of the participants gave a detailed exposition of where the Tordesillas line was supposed to be. The line, as represented in the maps of different textbooks, tends to wander about arbitrarily, eastwards and westwards, reflecting the uncertainties or even the biases of different authors. Of the three maps showing the line, the first, by Teixeira da Mota (1:139) is correct; the second, by Mariano Cuesta Domingo (1:252), wanders somewhat astray; and the third, by Jesús María López Ruiz (1:371), is wrong. The map used to decorate the front covers, a cartographic monstrosity first printed in Spain in 1601, shows the Portuguese as entitled to perhaps no more than one-tenth of the land area of South America; it is an excellent example of “political” cartography.
Tordesillas specified that the dividing meridian, to be drawn from pole to pole, lay 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. If we assume that an Iberian maritime league was exactly equal to three- and-a-half nautical miles, that the point of departure was the westernmost promontory (25°2′45″W) of the westernmost Cape Verdean island (Santo Antão), and that the measurement should be made at the equator, then it follows that the Tordesillas line should be drawn precisely at the point corresponding to the modern meridian of 46°56′45″W.
In northern Brazil the line of 46°56′45″ lies 168 km east of Belém, Pará, and in the south it reaches the coast at a point 72 km southwest of Santos. Strictly interpreted it should have excluded the Portuguese from the Amazon River and its basin, from the Brasília region and all points west, and from Campinas and all points south.
Did sixteenth-century Iberians have a clear idea of where the line should lie? Materials in these articles provide evidence for an affirmative answer. As early as 1495 the Catalan cosmographer, Jaime Ferrer, located Tordesillas with some precision, making an error of little more than one degree (1:125-126), while in 1566 Friar Andrés de Urdaneta’s calculation (1:235) was only 12′5″ (a mere 22.7 km) off the mark. Portuguese cartography of the early 1500s deliberately falsified the coast of Brazil south of Cabo Frio, showing it running due south instead of west-southwest (1:145). Portuguese maps show an eastward bias—that is, a tendency to locate Brazilian geographical features farther eastward than was accurate—while Spanish maps display a westward bias; and thus both traditions of political cartography betray an acute sensitivity about the true location of the line.
This point is important because it suited both Spaniards and Portuguese, on different occasions, to pretend that no one knew where Tordesillas should be drawn (2:169). The politicians deliberately clouded the issue by arguing about the length of a degree, where to begin the measurement, and what latitude to use. Historians should not be misled by the intentional obscurantism of the discussion, nor should they underestimate the skill of sixteenth-century cosmographers.
Since the most bitter of the disputes concerned the Spice Islands, it is appropriate that six participants wrote on Asian subjects (Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María, María Lourdes Díaz-Trechuelo, Mariano Cuesta Domingo, Alfonso González González, Emilio Gómez Piñol, and Ángel Santos Hernández). The Asian controversy has implications for the Americas. For some years the Portuguese thought that the Moluccas lay within the Castilian sphere; they were willing, according to Luís Mendonça de Albuquerque (1:131-132), to cede large stretches of Brazilian wilderness in exchange for adjustments in Asia. But by 1541 João de Castro had fixed the position of Java with astonishing precision (1:135), and it was clear that not only the Moluccas but also the Philippines lay on the Portuguese side of the line.
The Tordesillas line, when globally considered, lends itself to curious games, for an adjustment made in one hemisphere necessarily requires a counter-adjustment in the other. If the Portuguese Carmelites were entitled to fly the Portuguese flag in the Upper Amazon missions at a point corresponding to 69°W, then the Philippines, the Moluccas, Borneo, and half of Java lay within the Castilian hemisphere. But likewise, if the Spaniards could lawfully occupy Puerto Princesa (118°42′E) in Palawan, then the Portuguese were justified in their possession of Manaus and Mato Grosso and could claim the Guianas, Paraguay, Uruguay, and the Paraguay River and La Plata estuary.
Incongruities such as these led eventually to formal abrogation. The decline of the agreement is traced in long articles by Ángel Santos Hernández (2:9-79), Francisco de Solano (2:113-141), and Demetrio Ramos Pérez (2:163-193). Solano states that the real Luso-Spanish frontier and the line of demarcation “never coincided” (2:114). Yet, in spite of this, as late as 1776 (on the eve of repudiation), Ramos Pérez shows that Spanish ministers insisted on the inviolability of Tordesillas, with mutual restoration of unlawfully held territory (2:176). This initial bargaining position also suited the Spanish government’s successor states in South America, for Tordesillas is the grandmother of all Brazilian border disputes.
