On June 18, 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued a document that would reshape the Atlantic world.

Dum Diversas — “Until Different” — granted King Alfonso V of Portugal the authority to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed.” The bull authorized the Portuguese crown to “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”¹

This was not about race. This was about religion. The document made no mention of skin color, ethnicity, or continental origin. The sorting mechanism was faith: Christian versus non-Christian. Believer versus enemy of Christ.

The legal framework for everything that followed — the depopulation of Labrador, the slave markets of Seville, the transformation of Cape Verde from uninhabited islands to Atlantic slave port — began with this single papal decree.

Dum Diversas was not theoretical. It was operational.

The papal bull established “perpetual slavery” as a “legal art” — a juridical mechanism for the systematic enslavement of non-Christians.¹ The document didn’t create slavery; it legalized it under church authority and made it hereditary. The children of the enslaved would remain enslaved. Their children’s children would remain enslaved. Forever.

This was revolutionary. Previous forms of bondage — in medieval Europe, in Islamic territories, in indigenous American societies — typically allowed for manumission, adoption, or integration across generations. Dum Diversas created a new category: permanent, inheritable, religiously sanctioned slavery for all enemies of Christ.

The Portuguese crown now had papal authority to enslave anyone who was not Christian. The definition of “Saracen and pagan” would expand to include anyone the Portuguese encountered who did not accept the Catholic faith.

Three years later, the same pope issued Romanus Pontifex.

Where Dum Diversas had authorized enslavement, Romanus Pontifex authorized territorial conquest. Together, the two bulls established the Doctrine of Discovery — the legal principle that Christian European powers could claim any land not occupied by Christians.¹

The doctrine was elegantly circular: if you were not Christian, you had no property rights. If you had no property rights, your land could be claimed. If your land was claimed, you could be enslaved as a non-Christian occupying Christian territory.

The papal bulls weren’t separate policies; they were components of a single system. Conquest and enslavement were legally and theologically unified. The church had sanctioned both the taking of land and the taking of people under the same religious logic.

This is the framework that would govern Portuguese operations in Cape Verde, Spanish operations in the Caribbean, and European operations throughout the Atlantic world for the next four centuries.

The timing is not accidental.

Juneteenth — June 19 — marks the effective end of chattel slavery in America. But the enslavement of indigenous Americans began on June 18, 1452, with the issuance of Dum Diversas.¹ The two dates are separated by 413 years and one day.

This is not numerological speculation. It is documentary fact. The papal bull that authorized the enslavement of “enemies of Christ” was issued in mid-June. The federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in America falls on the anniversary of that authorization.

The connection runs deeper than calendar coincidence. The same legal framework that allowed the Portuguese to enslave Beothuk from Labrador and ship them to Cape Verde as “negroes” was the framework that governed plantation slavery in the American South. Dum Diversas didn’t just authorize the enslaving of individuals; it authorized the creation of the entire system.

The key phrase is “enemies of Christ wheresoever placed.”

This language gave the Portuguese — and later, other European powers operating under papal authority — unlimited geographical scope. “Wheresoever placed” meant anywhere in the world. Any person who was not Christian, in any location, could be legally enslaved under church authority.²

In practice, this meant that when Portuguese ships arrived off the coast of Labrador in 1501, the Beothuk they encountered were automatically classified as enemies of Christ. When Columbus encountered the Taíno in the Caribbean, they were enemies of Christ. When Portuguese traders reached Cape Verde, any non-Christian they found was legally enslaveable.¹

The religious categories preceded and determined the racial ones. Before there were “negroes,” there were “enemies of Christ.” Before there was “African” versus “Indian,” there was Christian versus non-Christian.

Without Dum Diversas, there is no Cape Verde slave port.

The papal bull didn’t just authorize individual acts of enslavement; it created the legal architecture for the entire Atlantic slave system. The document gave European powers religious justification, legal protection, and institutional backing for what would become a four-century program of human extraction and relabeling.¹

Every indigenous American shipped from Labrador to Cape Verde was enslaved under the authority of Dum Diversas. Every person sold in the slave markets of Seville as a “negro without a place of origin” was sold under the same papal authority. Every plantation established in Cape Verde, the Canaries, or the Azores using enslaved labor was established within the legal framework created by this document.

The papal bull was not the beginning of slavery. But it was the beginning of a new kind of slavery — perpetual, inheritable, religiously sanctioned, and globally applicable. The machinery that would transform indigenous Americans into “Cape Verdeans” and eventually into “African Americans” required this legal foundation to operate.