Dum Diversas by Pope Nicholas the 5th to enslave Afrikans!
Abraham Madu
Dum Diversas (English: While different) is a papal bull issued on 18 June 1452 by Pope Nicholas V. It authorized King Afonso V of Portugal to fight, subjugate, and conquer "those rising against the Catholic faith and struggling to extinguish Christian Religion"—namely, the "Saracens (Muslims) and pagans" in a militarily disputed African territory. The document consigned warring enemies that lost to "perpetual servitude".[1][2] This and the subsequent bull (Romanus Pontifex), issued by Nicholas in 1455, gave the Portuguese what they saw as moral justification to freely acquire slaves along the African coast by force or trade. The edicts are thus seen as having facilitated the Portuguese slave trade from West Africa and as having legitimized the European colonization of the African continent.[3]
In the secular interpretation of religious doctrines present in Dum Diversas (concerning just wars and prisoner labor from those wars),[4] the statement was used as a supposed moral recognition of both (a.) Portugal's rights to territories it had discovered along the West African coast as well as (b.) the reduction of innocent infidels to slaves and the defining of non-Christian territories as perpetual vassals of the Christian monarch.[5]
Pope Calixtus III reiterated Nicholas in the 1456 bull Inter caetera (not to be confused with Alexander VI's bull of the same title), renewed by Pope Sixtus IV in 1481 and Pope Leo X in 1514 with Precelse denotionis. The concept for consigning exclusive spheres of influence to certain nation states was extended to the Americas in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI with Inter caetera.[6][7] The use of innocent, innocuous infidels as forced labor slaves was also condemned by the Catholic Church in that era with statements such as Sublimius Deus by Pope Paul III. But in the end, Dum Diversas had an important legacy in developing European colonialism and its enslavement of African and American natives, with the exact intent of the Catholic Church to institute such a system of enslavement as well as the specifics of its role debated by historians to this day.
Background
Afonso V of PortugalBy the summer of 1452 Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II had completed the Rumelihisarı fortress on the western or European side of the Bosporus. Located several miles north of Constantinople, it commanded the narrowest part of the strait. Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI wrote to Pope Nicholas for help. Issued less than a year before the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the bull may have been intended to begin another crusade against the Ottoman Empire.[8] It was not until Afonso V of Portugal responded to a papal call for aid against the Turks that Pope Nicholas V agreed to support the Portuguese claims regarding territory in Africa.[9] Although some troops arrived from the mercantile city-states in the north of Italy, Pope Nicholas did not have the influence the Byzantines thought that he had over the Western kings and princes. France and England were both weakened by the Hundred Years' War, and Spain was still engaged in conflict with Islamic strongholds in Iberia. Any western contribution was not adequate to counterbalance Ottoman strength.