<Articles>The Intended Partition of Frontiers from the Reconquista to the Demarcacion (Special Issue : FRONTIERS, BOUNDARIES, BORDERS, AND LIMITS)

The modern English "demarcation, " meaning to mark out border lines, derives from the Castilian Demarcacion and the Portuguese Demarcacao, connoting the partition of the world in the early modern age. The Spanish and Portuguese maritime empires had shared a geopolitical discourse on the Demarcation in order to justify their conquest and division of the non-Christian world that had not yet been claimed by any Christian prince. The discourse originated in certain treaties between the Christian monarchies on the Iberian Peninsula. In chief, Castile and Aragon had staked out two spheres of prospective conquest in Al-Andalus and Mauritania from the middle of the 12th century to the early 14th century. The Reconquista was presumed to be justified by the ideal of recovering the Visigothic domains from Muslims rule. But when the Portuguese reconnoitered along the West African coast and the Atlantic Islands in the first half of the 15th century, exceeding the limits of such a recovery of lost lands, their expansion needed to be authorized and sanctioned by the ideal of 'discovery, ' and the Papal bulls granting them such privilege. The Spaniards (Castilians) caught up with the Portuguese by virtue of the Columbian voyages of discovery and the bulls of Pope Alexander IV. The two nations negotiated to align their own spheres of future conquest. The Treaty of Tordesillas was signed in July 7, 1494, to make the Demarcation a partition of the world. This meant, at least on paper, that the two great frontiers spread out from the Line of Demarcation in the Atlantic to the east and to the west. From the 1510s onward, however, another interpretation of the Line of Demarcation had emerged. According to this interpretation, the Line of Demarcation extended to the other hemisphere as the 'Ante-Meridian, ' bisecting the globe. It was the Spanish voyage conducted by the Portuguese fidalgo Ferdinand Magellan that forced both the monarchies to recognize the Ante-Meridian as a diplomatic convenience. Magellan's astronomer had measured and logged the geographical coordinates, latitudes and longitudes of the points they reached during the great voyage. This ironically resulted in confirming an interpretation unfavorable to the Spanish claim on the Moluccas Islands and the Philippines discovered by Magellan, but important data seems to have been manipulated. After the circumnavigation of the Victoria, the serious issue of the dominion over the Moluccas Islands arose between the two nations. Legal experts, scholars, and navigators commissioned by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns met at the border cities of Badajoz-Elvas in April to May 1524 to discuss how and where the line of Ante-Demarcation should be located in Asia, and which monarchy had the right to dominate or possess the Moluccas Islands. They were unable to resolve these issues. But both monarchies maintained the discourse on the Demarcation to keep other European powers out of their spheres of influence and to stand against the idea of effective occupation until the latter half of 18th century.