Romanus Pontifex

Romanus Pontifex is a papal bull, one of a series of fifteenth-century papal documents that granted Iberian crowns rights over newly encountered lands and peoples outside Christendom. Accounts of the Spanish Empire cite it, together with Inter Caetera and the Treaty of Tordesillas, as part of the legal and political foundation for dividing the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal. Such bulls were used to justify conquest, colonisation and the enslavement of non-Christians.