Why do Brazilians speak Portuguese? The Treaty of Tordesillas!

Gracias? Obrigada? If you’ve ever wondered why Brazilians speak Portuguese while the rest of South and Central America converses in Spanish, vamos to Tordesillas, where an important but rather unknown (at least to me) treaty was signed in 1494.

I’d never heard of the pretty town of Tordesillas in northwestern Spain until I researched a route between our home in Portugal and our friend’s home in Zaragoza, Spain. The Treaty of Tordesillas Museum plus the Christopher Columbus Museum in the nearby city of Valladolid promised to break up our 10-hour drive.

Visiting both museums and combining the information gave us a fascinating look into how Brazilians came to speak Portuguese.

In a nutshell, you can extend a big “obrigada [thanks]” to Columbus (called Cristóbal Colón in Spanish). But dive into the details and you’ve got an eyebrow-raising story, involving more than a few mistakes, misunderstandings, strategizing, political intrigue, influence peddling with the Pope, and even some possible fraud by Columbus.

The story in a bigger nutshell

After the bumbling Columbus returned from his first voyage to Asia/America, the Portuguese and Spanish got together to divvy up the world, deciding who could colonize and plunder wealth where. They signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, which drew a line from pole to pole down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Spain claimed all lands west of the line, while Portugal took the east.

Here’s the funny part: no one knew then that the line ran through what is now Brazil!

But all the gritty details of this story revealed the political intrigue and machinations, plus a more complicated understanding of Columbus.

The gritty, yet fascinating details

After a year of negotiations, the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed by representatives of the two countries on June 7, 1494, and later ratified by King Fernando and Queen Isabel of Castile (Spain) and King João II of Portugal. Copies have their respective lead seals.

Both museums included models of Columbus’s ships – the famous Pinta, Niña and Santa Maria – navigation instruments of the times, many maps, and copies of key documents. We examined them all, trying to decipher the old-fashioned script. The maps in sequence illustrated an expanding understanding of the world’s geography, from the time of Ptolemy (born sometime between the years 100 and 110) onwards. (We learned that excessive ornamentation and illustrations simply covered up areas where nobody knew what was there: the “Here be monsters” method of mapmaking.)

The Portuguese spent most of the 1400s sailing up and down the African coast. But sailing westward away from land must have sent shivers down their collective spines. The Atlantic Ocean was an enormous barrier until navigation moved from art to science, better ships were built, and new instruments were developed (especially the nautical astrolabe) so that explorers could sail out of sight of land. The Portuguese, led by Henry the Navigator, and the Castilians (later Spanish) led this new science.

On one level, the museums made the negotiations over the Treaty of Tordesillas sound like a friendly get-together of neighbours to co-fund a fence. “An act of mutual submission to the profound and historical sense there was in the call to peninsular brotherhood,” as the Tordesillas tourist pamphlet put it.

But that wasn’t the reality. The two countries had a long history of touchy relations, invasions and wars. Maritime exploration – with the titillating promises of colonization, gold, expensive spices and slaves – meant the competitive stakes were even higher. Long before Columbus set out, the two countries had already attempted to divide the world.

The previous treaty

Castile and Portugal had signed the 1479 Treaty of Alcaçobas that drew a horizontal line across the world, running from the Canary Islands through the tip of (as yet unknown) Florida. Castile got the Canary Islands while Portugal got everything south of the Canary Islands, plus Madeira and the Azores. The treaty effectively jump-started the Age of Exploration that shapes the world as we know it today.

But Columbus, who comes out as a rather bumbling character, upset that apple cart.

First off, the Santa Maria ship that he captained sank on Christmas Day, 1492. On the return to Europe in early 1493, he sailed on the Niña while Martin Alonso Pinzón captained the Pinta. During a storm near the Azores, they got separated. Pinzón landed in Spain at Bayona and sent word to Ferdinand and Isabel about the discoveries. Meanwhile, Columbus landed in Lisbon and shared his news with King João II of Portugal, who immediately claimed the “new” islands for Portugal since they were south of the Alcaçobas line.

Castile’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, who had funded Columbus’s explorations, were outraged. They appealed to Pope Alexander VI, who was from the Spanish province of Aragon. Not surprisingly, the pope agreed with them. That set in motion the negotiations that finally ended with the Treaty of Tordesillas.

But wait, there’s more intrigue and possible fraud

While the two sides were negotiating in Tordesillas, Columbus set sail for Cathay/America on his second trip, promising Ferdinand and Isabel he’d send more information. And he did. In April 1494, he sent back a map – a doctored map, according to a BBC article. He purposely placed Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) further north, on the same parallel as the Canary Islands (and Florida), to ensure Spain would control it.

Neither museum accuses Columbus of fraud or incompetence (indeed, they shy away from any controversies about him), but the treaty museum’s audioguide does note that he prepared the map so it would be easy for Ferdinand and Isabel to understand.

However, by the time his map arrived, Castile and Portugal had agreed to a vertical line, from pole to pole, instead.

But where to place that vertical line? Three were proposed.

• First: Columbus proposed a line through the Cape Verde Islands, but the Portuguese didn’t like that since Cape Verde was their colony.
• Second: Pope Alexander inserted his two cents’ worth, shifting the line westward by 100 leagues. The Portuguese still weren’t happy since it didn’t give them enough manoeuverability when sailing south in strong winds to get around the Canary Islands without infringing on Castilian territory.
• Third: King João proposed that the line shift to 370 leagues west of Cape Verde and both sides agreed. Castile would control everything west of the line, including Columbus’s recent finds, while Portugal took the east. Ferdinand and Isabel agreed, not knowing the line went through Brazil.

After months of negotiations, Castile and Portugal put quills to paper on June 7, 1494.

Six years later, Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral landed on that eastern tip of South America and claimed it for Portugal. As the centuries rolled on, Portugal expanded inland, establishing Brazil as a viceroyalty in 1640. In 1822, Brazil achieved independence from Portugal, but kept Portuguese as its official language.

Controversial Columbus

Today, Columbus is controversial at best. The sunny image many of us learned in school in the 1960s – of a brave explorer – have long been dashed as the real consequences have been openly discussed. His “discovery of America” led to rape, mutilation, enslavement, and annihilation of native peoples through disease and murder in the pursuit of gold, spices and other riches. (Indeed, we saw a statue in Buenos Aires that portrayed Columbus as the devil.)

The more I’ve read about Columbus, since our visits to Tordesillas and Valladolid, the more confused and conflicted I feel. He alone can’t be blamed for all the ills of colonialism – that’s on everyone from his era and afterwards who had the unmitigated gall to believe anything or anywhere or anyone they encountered belonged to them and could be enslaved to their own profit, despite clear evidence that people clearly lived there and had their own thriving cultures.

But do we judge the vanity and arrogance of Columbus et al based on today’s understandings? Depending on which rabbit holes you dive into on the internet, you can find people arguing that Columbus and Queen Isabel urged the explorers to treat native peoples decently. The museums didn’t mention that Columbus’s journal from his first voyage talked about the native peoples he met and how they would make good slaves.

Still, he was brave enough to be one of the first to use science to sail westward, out of the sight of land, to see what was out there. (The Vikings, of course, landed centuries earlier in what is now Newfoundland, Canada.)

I had always thought Columbus had set off for Asia more or less on a whim. But in fact, he spent years studying navigation and old maps and figuring out that he could reach the East by sailing West. He trained first in the Mediterranean, and then on the Portuguese islands of Madeira, where he married and his first son, Diego, was born. Then he moved to Lisbon, from whence he practised sailing the Atlantic and studied astronomy, cartography and navigation.

Since he was in Portugal, he first presented this plan to King João II of Portugal. João turned him down, so Columbus next approached Ferdinand and Isabel and pursued them for the next seven years until they finally said ‘Si.’

The Columbus museum in Valladolid displayed copies of a document called the Capitulations of Santa Fe, signed by Ferdinand, Isabel and Columbus, that outlined what Columbus was entitled to, most notably one-tenth of all the riches discovered and his title of Admiral and Viceroy of all the seas, islands and territories he discovered.

Each of his voyages met with disaster of one sort or another. On his third voyage, he was accused of corruption and abuse of power, and lost control of all voyages to the New World. He managed to wrangle support for a fourth voyage, still thinking he would reach Cathay. But it was the most disastrous of all. He was stranded in Jamaica for a year and faced confrontations with the natives and uprisings from his own people. He didn’t get home until late 1504.

Columbus became a rather pathetic figure in his last years. Stripped of his titles, he spent his last years following the monarchs around and begging for the riches he felt were his due. That’s how he ended up in Valladolid – Ferdinand and Isabel were there – and he died there in 1506.

The Tordesillas tie

Although Columbus’s death in Valladolid is marked with a plaque, he is buried in Seville’s cathedral. The Columbus museum displayed copies of his will.

So why was Tordesillas chosen as the site of these all-important negotiations? Although the town was in Castilian territory, and its monarchs spent time there, Portuguese queens had also lived there in the 1300s, so it could have been seen as neutral ground.

“The two crowns, without really knowing the impact of this agreement, lay the foundations to make the language that millions of people will speak, Portuguese in Brazil and Spanish in the rest,” said the treaty museum’s audioguide.

In 2007, the Treaty of Tordesillas was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, which was established in 1992 to preserve documentary heritage that reflects the world’s diversity of languages, peoples and cultures.

Documents themselves aren’t always thrilling to look at in museums, but when you think about what they represent, they’re truly impressive. Consider the continuing effects they have on the way people live their lives – I’m thinking Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the American Declaration of Independence. To those, I now add the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Muito bom. Saúde, Brasil!