Page:Two Introductory Lectures on the Science of International Law.djvu/13

 emperors; and where the analogy of positive or local law failed to supply a rule, or the gravity of the question demanded a more authoritative sanction, religion, in the person of the spiritual chief of the Western Church, was appealed to as supreme umpire, and a General Council had not unfrequently played the part of an European congress, and, by the side of ecclesiastical matters, regulated the temporal affairs of princes.

The geographical discoveries, however, which had marked the close of the fifteenth century, were calculated to give rise to a number of novel questions, and to awaken a conflict of claims requiring more than ever some settled standard of public law, as a rule of reference, whilst the religious revolution, which followed closely in the track of those discoveries, shook the authority of the canon law, one of the main pillars of European jurisprudence, and at the same time indisposed an influential portion of the civilised world to acknowledge any longer the Holy See as the oracle of the unwritten law, which should govern their international relations.

The authority of the Roman Pontiff, as the supreme arbitrator in temporal questions between states and princes, may be said to have reached its culminating point, when the Spaniards and the Portuguese referred to his decision their dispute as to the monopoly of the discovery of the sea-passage to the Indies, and compromised their quarrel by a partition of the New World into East and West. Alexander VI., who at that time occupied the papal chair, did not hesitate to sanction by a formal Bull this monstrous settlement, under the pretext of sending the soldiers of the Cross into the lands of the heathen. An imaginary line drawn from pole to pole was henceforth to