ruler of the new world.
How the Treaty of Tordisias divided South America into two warring worlds.
The modern map of the continent, with its huge Portuguese-speaking Brazil and mosaic of Spanish-speaking republics, was born not on the battlefields, but in the town of Tordesilla in Castile. In the summer of 1494, diplomats from the Spanish and Portuguese crowns established the first ever colonial excision of the Earth along a ruler.
The cynicism of this geopolitical deal laid the foundation for all future wars in South America.
It all started with a sincerely biased bull of Pope Alexander VI (Borgia), who in a generous gesture donated all the new lands discovered in his native Spain, cutting off the meridian only 100 feet from the Cape Verde Islands. The Portuguese King João II saw this as a declaration of war and threatened to blockade the Atlantic Ocean with his fleet.
In Tordisias, the parties spoke independently of the Vatican. In Lisbon, they pushed hard to move the dividing line 270 miles further west. Diplomats thought they were just dividing ocean lanes to India, but when Pedro Alvarez Cabral came upon the coast of South America 6 years later, the eastern bulge of the continent was legally Portuguese territory.
However, the line drawn on the card turned out to be a fiction in the face of the real thirst for profit.
In the 17th century, the Portuguese Bandirantes from São Paulo simply didn't care about the meridian and moved west. Taking advantage of the 60-year period of the Iberian Union, when the two empires were temporarily under the scepter of one monarch, the settlers went thousands of kilometers into the jungle, smashing Spanish Jesuit missions and capturing mines. When Madrid came to its senses, the Portuguese already had de facto control of the Amazon basin. In 1750, with the Treaty of Madrid, the Spanish could legitimize the seizure only by virtue of the powerful.
This is how the Treaty of Turdisias became the ancestor of Latin American dualism.