- Author:
- Browne, George Waldo
- Publication Info:
-
Boston:
Marshall Jones company,
1907,
pg 227
Text on page 227
village on mindanao.
CHAPTER IV.
spanish discovery and dominion.
AT the dawning of the sixteenth century, while the Philippinos were indolently whiling awray lives that were less than scratches in the sands of time, their greatest concern the state of the activity of the near-by volcano, their only care to be prepared for the terrible typhoon which came with equinoctial regularity, or the earthquake which was likely to break upon them as a thief in the night, and their most severe exertion a skirmish with some rival tribe, Spain and Portugal were quarrelling over the supremacy of the world. It mattered not if these European powers, in their ignorance of the land and sea, dreamed not of these island kinglets. Their fates hung in the balance of these ambitious nations.
Anxious to court the mutual favours of the rivals, Pope Alexander VI., styled "the vicar of God on earth," sought to end the intense feeling by issuing in 1494 a papal bull which declared that the globe should be divided into two hemispheres, the meridian of Cape Verde Islands and
the same degree of longitude on the opposite side of the sphere to be the
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