What Was the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)?

The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed on June 7, 1494, was an agreement between Spain and Portugal that divided the non-European world between the two Iberian powers. The treaty was an attempt to resolve conflicts that had arisen following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492, and it established a line of demarcation running from north to south through the Atlantic Ocean. Lands to the west of the line would belong to Spain, while lands to the east would belong to Portugal.

The treaty was negotiated under the auspices of Pope Alexander VI, who was himself Spanish (born Rodrigo Borgia). The original line of demarcation, set by papal bull in 1493, ran 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, but the Spanish and Portuguese governments soon agreed to move the line westward to 370 leagues. This shift gave Portugal more of the Atlantic and, in particular, the eastern part of South America — which would later be colonized as Brazil.

The Background to the Treaty

The treaty was a direct response to Columbus’s first voyage, which had raised questions about the rights of the two Iberian powers to claim the lands they discovered. Columbus had sailed under Spanish patronage, but Portugal also had claims to lands in the Atlantic based on the voyages of Prince Henry the Navigator and his successors. The two powers were on the verge of conflict, and the Pope intervened to prevent war.

The papal bull Inter caetera of 1493 had already attempted to settle the matter, granting to Spain all lands west of a meridian 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Portugal objected to this line, arguing that it gave Spain too much of the Atlantic. The two powers negotiated directly, and the resulting Treaty of Tordesillas moved the line westward to 370 leagues, which was believed at the time to give the Portuguese most of the eastern part of South America.

The Provisions of the Treaty

The Treaty of Tordesillas established a line of demarcation running from pole to pole through the Atlantic. Lands to the west of the line would belong exclusively to Spain, while lands to the east would belong to Portugal. The treaty did not address the question of who would have rights to lands in other parts of the world, including Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

The treaty also provided for joint Catholic missionary activity in the new lands, and it required both parties to refrain from exploring or claiming territory in the other’s sphere. In practice, however, the treaty proved difficult to enforce, and other European powers — particularly England, France, and the Netherlands — refused to recognize it.

The Implementation of the Treaty

The Treaty of Tordesillas had important practical consequences. By placing most of the Americas in the Spanish sphere, the treaty shaped the colonial expansion of the two Iberian powers. Spain went on to build a vast empire in the Americas, including Mexico, Peru, and large parts of Central and South America. Portugal, for its part, established a colonial presence in Brazil, which fell within the Portuguese sphere according to the treaty’s revised line.

The treaty also shaped the early history of Brazil. Although the line of demarcation was not precisely known at the time, the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral made landfall on the coast of Brazil in 1500, while on a voyage to India. Cabral’s claim to Brazil rested on the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the Portuguese quickly established a colonial presence in the region. Brazil would become a major Portuguese colony and an important source of sugar and gold for the Portuguese Empire.

The Treaty’s Limitations

The Treaty of Tordesillas had several important limitations. First, it was an agreement between only Spain and Portugal, and other European powers were not bound by its terms. England, France, and the Netherlands rejected the treaty and began to establish their own colonial claims in the late 16th and early 17th centuries — covered in detail in our pages on the British Empire and the Dutch and French empires. The English claim to North America, for example, was based on John Cabot’s voyages in 1497, and the French and Dutch claims were based on later voyages of exploration.

Second, the treaty did not address the question of who would have rights to lands in the Pacific, the East Indies, or other regions outside the Atlantic. As European exploration extended to other parts of the world, the treaty grew irrelevant. The Magellan expedition, which set out in 1519, and the subsequent Spanish colonization of the Philippines, took place far outside the original scope of the treaty.

Third, the line of demarcation was not precisely fixed at the time the treaty was signed, and it remained a matter of dispute for many years. The exact location of the 370-league line was a source of conflict between Spain and Portugal throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.

The Long-Term Significance

The Treaty of Tordesillas had a profound and lasting impact on the colonial history of the Americas. By dividing the non-European world between Spain and Portugal, the treaty helped to establish the linguistic and cultural divisions of Latin America. Spanish is the predominant language in most of Central and South America, while Portuguese is spoken in Brazil — a division that reflects the treaty’s effect on colonial expansion.

The treaty also shaped the development of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires. The two empires had very different characters: the Spanish Empire was more focused on conquest and the extraction of precious metals, while the Portuguese Empire was more focused on trade and the establishment of commercial networks. These differences were in part a result of the geographic and demographic circumstances of their respective colonial possessions, but they were also influenced by the treaty’s allocation of territories.

The Treaty of Tordesillas shaped Iberian diplomacy for nearly four centuries, but its practical reach narrowed rapidly. The line itself was never extended to the Pacific, so the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529) was negotiated to handle the antimeridian. English, French, and Dutch colonial claims proliferated outside the treaty’s terms from the 1560s on, and the treaty had little practical force beyond Iberia by 1700. The 1750 Treaty of Madrid and the 1777 Treaty of San Ildefonso addressed specific Spanish-Portuguese border disputes in South America but did not “supersede” Tordesillas as a global instrument — the non-Iberian powers, which had never accepted the treaty in the first place, were unaffected.

For more on the Spanish Empire that emerged in the western hemisphere, see our page on the Spanish Empire in the Americas. For the Portuguese side of the story, see our page on the Portuguese Empire. And for an overview of the period in which the treaty was signed, see our timeline of the Age of Exploration.

The treaty was the most famous of several early attempts to divide the non-European world among European powers. Its underlying logic — that the Pope had the authority to grant heathen lands to Christian monarchs — would be invoked in later treaties and disputes for the next three centuries, and it set important precedents for the colonial empires that followed.