FIRST GLOBAL LINES
No sooner had the contours of the earth emerged as a real globe – not just sensed as myth, but representable as fact and measured as space – than there arose a wholly new and hitherto unimaginable problem: the spatial ordering of the earth in terms of international law.
The new global image, resulting from the circumnavigation of the earth and the great discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries, required a new spatial order. Thus began the epoch of modern international law that lasted until the 20th century.
Lines were drawn to divide and distribute the whole earth. These were the first attempts to establish the dimensions and demarcations of a global spatial order. Since these lines were drawn during the first stage of the new planetary consciousness of space, they were conceived only in terms of surface areas, i.e., superficially, with divisions drawn more or less geometrically: more geometrico. Later, when historical and scientific consciousness had assimilated (in every sense of the word) the planet down to the last cartographical and statistical details, the practical-political need not only for a geometric surface division, but for a substantive spatial order of the earth became evident. [86]
From the 16th to the 20th century, European international law considered Christian nations to be the creators and representatives of an order applicable to the whole earth.
global linear thinking
The first attempts in international law to divide the earth as a whole according to the new global concept of geography began immediately after 1492. These were also the first adaptations to the new, planetary image of the world.
[…] global linear thinking […] represents a chapter in the historical development of spatial consciousness.
It began with the discovery of a ‘new world’ and the start of the ‘modern age’, and kept pace with the development of geographical maps and of the globe itself.
[…] no sooner had the first maps and globes been produced, and the first scientific concept of the true form of our planet and of the New World in the West been established, than the first global lines of division and distribution were drawn. [88]
Shortly after the discovery of America, the famous line in Pope Alexander VI’s edict Inter caetera divinae (May 4, 1494) was drawn. It ran from the North Pole to the South Pole, 100 miles west of the meridian of the Azores and Cape Verde.
Pope Alexander VI’s global line was consistent with the one drawn somewhat to the west of it, approximately through the middle of the Atlantic ocean (370 miles west of Cape Verde), but the Spanish-Portuguese Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7 1494), in which the two Catholic powers agreed that all newly discovered territories west of the line would go to Spain and those east of the line to Portugal. This line was called a partition del mar oceano, and was sanctioned by Pope Julius II.
The Molucca Line gradually became the border on the other half of the globe. In the Treaty of Saragossa (1526), a raya [line] was drawn through the Pacific Ocean, at first along what is now the 135th meridian, i.e., through eastern Siberia, Japan, and the middle of Australia.