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- Article No. 05

# Charting the Doctrine in the Colonial Archive: Papal Bulls and the Translation of the ‘Discovery’ Purpose

            Sebastian Modrow

               March 3, 2026

                 |  doi.org/10.17613/bgjht-pva08

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## Table of Contents

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.

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          Keywords:

            doctrine-of-christian-discovery

            colonialism

            papal-bulls

            crusade-ideology

            colonial-archives

            iberian-monarchies

            indigenous-dispossession

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