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coordinate embassies and their staffs. These ministries were still far from their modern form. Many had extraneous internal responsibilities. Britain had two departments with frequently overlapping powers until 1782. These early foreign ministries were also much smaller. France, which boasted the largest foreign affairs department, had only 70 full-time employees in the 1780s. The elements of modern diplomacy slowly spread to Eastern Europe and arrived in Russia by the early eighteenth century. The entire system was greatly disrupted by the French Revolution and the subsequent years of warfare. The revolution would see commoners take over the diplomacy of the French state, and of those conquered by revolutionary armies. Ranks of precedence were abolished. Napoleon also refused to acknowledge diplomatic immunity, imprisoning several British diplomats accused of scheming against France. He had no patience for the often slow moving process of formal diplomacy. After the fall of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 established an international system of diplomatic rank. Disputes on precedence among nations (and the appropriate diplomatic ranks used) persisted for over a century until after World War II, when the rank of ambassador became the norm.
At the end of the fifteenth century, when Columbus had just discovered America, Spain and Portugal led all the nations of Europe and of the world in maritime enterprise. While the great Genoese, and Alonzo de Ojeda, and Amerigo Vespucci, and other famous adventurers, were engaged in the discovery and exploration of a new world for Castille and Leon, Bartholemew Diaz, in the services of Portugal, pushed southward along the coast of Africa and doubled the Cape of Good Hope, being the first to do so since the time of Pharoah Necho, King of Egypt. Following in his wake, the great Portuguese navigator, Vasco de Gama, sailed through the straits of Mozambique, plunged boldly into the unknown wastes of the Indian Ocean, and reached the coast of Hindustan. A controversy arose between Spain and Portugal as to their respective spheres of action and their dominion over the discovered region beyond the Ocean. The controversy was submitted to Pope Alexander VI as arbitrator. Drawing a meridian line north and south some distance west of the Azores, the Pontiff allotted all the discoveries west of that line to Spain and all east of it to Portugal. It so happened that a few years afterwards, in A.D. 1500, the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvarez Cabral, bound on a voyage to Hindustan, was driven out of his course by a storm on the west coast of Africa, and came on the shores of Brazil. The land which he discovered was east of the meridian line drawn by Pope Alexander, and became Portuguese territory, while elsewhere to the west the power of Spain became dominant. The arbitration was a notable one; it was readily accepted by both parties; and it removed for all time all danger of conflict between Spain and Portugal in respect of their maritime enterprises and colonial acquisitions. (Note. - The action of Pope Alexander VI, who has sins enough for which to answer without the imputation to him of sins of which he is not guilty, has been misrepresented by various writers who knew better, as an attempt on his part to give the islands of the sea, as though he claimed dominion over them, to Spain and Portugal. The act of the Pope, as is very apparent from the documents themselves in which the controversy was stated and decided, was purely and simply an arbitration, and not an evidence of any assumption of papal ownership or authority over these transAtlantic lands.)