Treaty of Tordesillas

The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed on 7 June 1494 at Tordesillas in the Crown of Castile between representatives of Spain and Portugal and ratified by both crowns later that year, divided the non-European world outside Europe between the two Iberian powers along a meridian set 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, granting Portugal rights to lands east of the line and Spain rights to lands west of it. The line superseded an earlier, less generous division Pope Alexander VI had drawn in his 1493 bulls of donation following Columbus's first voyage, and Pope Julius II eventually confirmed the treaty in 1506, though Portugal and Castile alone had negotiated and set its terms. Because the meridian ran through the as-yet-unexplored South American continent, the treaty had the accidental long-term effect of giving Portugal a claim to the Brazilian coast once it was reached in 1500, the root of Brazil's distinct Portuguese-speaking heritage among otherwise Spanish-speaking Latin America. Other European powers never recognized the treaty's division and it was effectively abandoned in the Americas by the eighteenth century, though it remains a landmark in the history of international law as one of the earliest agreements to divide overseas territory by treaty rather than conquest alone.