A new treasure

This handwritten document begins with a decorated rendering of
the name of Pope Alexander VI.  

WE ARE PUTTING ON OUR RARE BOOKS HAT to thank the librarians of Western State College of Law in San Diego for their donation of a special book to the MSMU Libraries. Its unpromising title is The earliest diplomatic Documents on America, the papal bulls of 1493 and the treaty of Tordesillas reproduced and translated, but it nevertheless sheds light on an extraordinary chapter in the history of the Americas.

Alexander VI was one of the
so-called Borgia or Borja popes.

These famous, or infamous, proclamations (known as "bulls") by Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) handed Spain political "ownership" of all the newly found countries in the Western Hemisphere, from North Pole to South Pole and everything in between.

Coming just a year after Columbus' voyage to the Americas, the bulls by this Spanish-born pope have been condemned by many modern scholars for spreading colonialism, subjugating native peoples and even condoning slavery. But regardless of their tragic outcome, the documents are an important part of the legal legacy of the New World, affecting global diplomacy and maritime law for centuries.

Even today, papal proclamations
are made in Latin.

Separate from the contents, the book is interesting in its own right. The early to middle 20th Century saw a number of high-end reproductions of famous books and documents aimed in limited press runs at  discerning book collectors.

Nowadays we take such things as photocopying and scanning for granted, but the technology for accurate reproduction of a printed or handwritten page was still in its infancy in the 1920s.  Only 172 copies of this book were printed in Berlin in 1927 (translated and published by Paul Gottschalk).

Besides the documents, the book also has lots of amazing maps along with explanatory text.

We have a few other important facsimiles here in Archives and Special Collections at Chalon. In the 1950s, Countess Estelle Doheny gave to the Mount library the first-ever reproductions of the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels (both treasured manuscripts from ancient Ireland) and the Gutenberg Bible.

A famous book collector herself, Mrs. Doheny recognized that these works were part of the fabric of Western Civilization and therefore worthy of inclusion in a good liberal arts library.  In the same vein, we are now proud to add Alexander VI's landmark documents to the collection.