The Birth of the Society

This project studies a Jesuit religious network that helped create, and which itself could only have functioned in, a globalized world. The discovery of new lands across the Atlantic prompted Pope Alexander VI (r. 1492–1503) to issue a series of three bulls in May 1493, usually referred to as Inter caetera, the title of two of them. Justified by the Vicar of Christ's unique authority to offer protection to the natives, the bulls drew a meridian one hundred leagues (about five hundred fifteen kilometres) west of the Cape Verde Islands, demarcating the territories of the two Iberian kingdoms. The Treaty of Tordesillas shifted the demarcation line to a position three hundred seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.

Much of the urgency behind such efforts at organizing the world was soteriological. Whose responsibility were the newfound souls? The pope enjoyed spiritual jurisdiction over Christendom through his bishops. A bishop's ordinary jurisdiction, however, stopped at the borders of his diocese. Regions outside the territorial limits of any bishopric became mission territories, where the pope alone held jurisdiction. In addition, the idea that all islands belonged to the pope dated back at least to the Donation of Constantine.