WI: Pope Alexander VI doesn't give Spain and Portugal a monopoly in the Americas

On Tuesday, December 5, 2017 at 5:55:04 PM UTC-6, The Horny Goat wrote: > ROn Tue, 5 Dec 2017 13:05:47 -0800 (PST), jerry kraus > wrote: > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >So, really, there are a variety of ways these things could be accomplished. How about simply excommunicating King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and have them burned as heretics by the Holy Inquisition? Might have been possible. Of course, Alexander VI was Spanish himself, and a greedy financier to boot, so, he was hardly likely to discourage his sovereign's acquisitiveness. That was the problem, and, that was why we had the Protestant Reformation. The Church was very well situated to redistribute wealth, they did it all the time. And, they had quite good accountants, too! It was simply a matter of whether they really wanted to do the right thing. They didn't, and they paid the price. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > On what grounds could Ferdinand and Isabella possibly been considered > heretic? You have to do better than "might have been possible" > > the only thing I can possibly think about would be protecting the > conversos but that's unlikely. It's not like they were about to make > peace with Grenada after all. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fair enough, Horny, an exceedingly reasonable question. I'm really just suggesting alternative approaches, which might possibly have averted the Protestant Reformation, and conceivably the genocide of the native population of the Americas, as well. There actually wasn't anything "heretical" about Galileo Galilei's writings or inquiries, they were perfectly consistent with those of the Vatican astronomers investigating the ideas of Nicolaus Coperinicus. But, he was attracting so much attention because of his charisma, that his views were disrupting conventional acceptance of the Ptolemaic system, and that was undermining Church authority. So, they attacked him for failing to come up with a satisfactory theoretical alternative, something Isaac Newton eventually did with his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, several decades later. Now, Isaac Newton most definitely was a "heretic", in any conventional, contemporary sense of the term. He was both a practicing Unitarian, and a practicing Alchemist. Virtually a practicing Warlock, actually, but Protestant and Catholic church authorities were equally fond of his scientific work, nevertheless, because it was so organized and elegant. Made for terrific authoritarian theology! So, really, the Church was quite willing to brand anyone a "heretic", simply if they were politically inconvenient. And what could possibly have been more politically inconvenient than the economic disruption caused by the discovery of the Americas? So, if the Catholic Church had been wise, and not simply greedy, they would have been very well advised to control the "heretical" activities of Ferdinand and Isabella in the New World!