WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

Clement VI’s dispensation of the Canary Islands that the question of invading peaceful peoples
due to their beliefs was first raised as a possible policy and not just speculated in legal theory. 36
This does not mean that Clement VI’s grant of the Canaries was the first time in which
the Church articulated explicitly colonial goals, only that it was the first time in which the
rhetoric of colonialism coincided with an ontological justification of conquest. Although the
Papacy had authorized the colonization and invasion of Mediterranean Islands in the eleventh
century and also of Ireland in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, it had done so because of the
resistance of the natives to the Church and not simply because of their infidelity. 37 Similarly,
although the legal and religious reasons of Clement’s grant rehearse much of the debate of the
legitimacy of infidel sovereignty begun, during the crusades, under Pope Innocent IV in his
commentaries to Gregory IX’s Decretales, they do so by taking up as policy and not as legal
argumentation the commentaries of the canonist Hostiensis which had underlied most of this
scholastic debate and speculation. 38
Although Innocent and Hostiensis’s discussion on infidel authority overshadowed the
legal repercussions of Clement VI’s position in respect to infidel lands, the latter did have
notable perlocutionary strength as is evidenced by the many contentious reactions to it from his
contemporaries. These responses ranged from derision (in Petrarch’s mocking of Luís de la
Cerda’s claim to sovereignty in the De Vita Solitaria) to fear (in Adam Murimuth’s depiction in
his Continuatio chronicarum of how the English ambassadors, mistaking the Canary Islands for
the British Isles, raced back to tell Edward III that the Pope had removed his sovereignty and
36 Muldoon Popes 88-90.
37 See Luis Weckmann, Las Bulas Alejandrinas de 1493 y la Teoría Política del Papado Medieval, (Editorial Jus:
Mexico City,1949) 61-64 and James Muldoon, “The Ties that Bind: Legal Status and Imperial Power,” Law and the
Illicit in Medieval, Europe, eds. Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and E.Ann Matter (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008) 60-61.
38 Ibid. 18.
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