Treaty of Tordesillas (1494 — Iberian global territorial partition)

Class card for the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed June 7 1494 at Tordesillas, Castile, between Ferdinand II of Aragon + Isabella I of Castile (Spain) and John II of Portugal. The treaty divided the extra-European world along a meridian 370 leagues west of Cape Verde (~46°37'W): Spain received territories west of the line (the bulk of the Americas); Portugal received territories east of the line (Brazil, Africa, India, Asian circuits). The treaty was mediated and legitimated by Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia; Spanish-aligned), extending his earlier Inter caetera bull of May 4 1493. It is the first globally-binding colonial- territorial instrument: a semiotic machine that converts papal authority into a legal- geographic partition of the non-European world as sovereign property. The treaty's operational grammar is incorporeal — it creates exclusive legal rights to trade and colonization over vast territories via text and papal imprimatur alone, requiring no immediate corporeal enforcement. Its enforcement is projected through the Spanish and Portuguese empires' naval and trading machinery. The machine is disregarded by France, England, and the Netherlands from the mid-16th century onward; its practical force collapses under Anglo-Dutch-French maritime competition by ~1600–1650. It is formally superseded as an operative instrument by the Treaty of Madrid January 13 1750 (Spain-Portugal Pacific boundary revision) and rendered legally moot thereafter. Cross-era forward: the Tordesillas logic of great-power territorial partition by international legal instrument (backed by institutional legitimation) prefigures Westphalian sovereignty (1648) and the mercantilist monopoly system (1664). [CANON] for treaty text, signatories, line, dates; [EXTRAP] for coupling-strength values and cross-era claim reach.