Document Type
Article
Date
3-3-2026
Keywords
Doctrine of Christian Discovery, colonialism, papal bulls, crusade ideology
Disciplines
History
Description/Abstract
The following chapter is intended to give an overview over the role and function of a particular set of papal bulls that together helped define the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, an ideology that, as a precursor of international law, helped define the rules of European colonial conquest. The chapter will explain the evolution of this Doctrine as a dialectical process between worldviews and positions of the papacy and the Iberian monarchies and the progressing results of the ‘discovery’ process, that is, the early process of European overseas expansion. Through selective close reading of the bulls’ texts, I will then focus on the bulls’ central contribution to the DoCD, which I see in the transformation of the crusade idea and the Church’s mission for the salvation of all souls into a global colonial strategy and, ‘en passant,’ the global dispossession of indigenous peoples. In synthesis, I will at the end present the Doctrine of Christian Discovery as a 3-step argument as I see it repeatedly being made, adapted, and refined in this set of papal bulls.
Recommended Citation
Modrow, Sebastian, "Charting the Doctrine in the Colonial Archive: Papal Bulls and the Translation of the 'Discovery' Purpose" (2026). School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship. 206.
https://surface.syr.edu/istpub/206
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
