November verse 8: Dum diversas

I’m not sure that my little stanzas can address truly horrible things. It’s almost a kind of blasphemy to tie up great, tragic events and concepts into a neat little rhyming package. But one of my aims in these November stanzas is to grab whatever is occupying my mind at the time and wrangle it into verse.

This issue may not be as urgently of the moment as some, but I learned some time ago that the English invaders of Australia in the late 1700s didn’t invoke the doctrine of terra nullius as justification. For at least the first fifty years of settlement, no one pretended that there was anything other than a war of occupation and resistance. Courts and governments only started talking about terra nulliius in the 1860s or later.* The moral / legal justification, if there was any, dated back to the Doctrine of Discovery, which was understood to have originated in a series of papal bulls in the 1400s. The Doctrine of Discovery has been repudiated by Pope Francis but the bulls have not been rescinded.

The first of the papal bulls, Dum diversas, was issued by Pope Nicolas V in 1452, addressed to King Alfonse of Portugal. If you have the stomach for it, you can read an English translation here. Here’s my short, rhyming version of the ghastly gist:

Verse 8: Dum Diversas
Divine Love is what animates us,
faith for which Christ shed his blood.
We must protect from all that hates us
all our flock, from lamb to stud, 
and so we grant you full, free power
wherever Christ's love does not flower:
invade, fight, conquer, subjugate,
take land, enslave, appropriate,
enrich yourselves, no mercy ever, 
leave no stone upon a stone,
destroy, heap blood-stained bone on bone.
And all who help in this endeavour,
should they die, to lose or win,
their souls shall be absolved of sin.

* I am not a historian. Please correct me in the comments if I need correcting.