New Worlds and Th eir Challenges 131solute own er, did not possess the right or power to make alienations that
were prejudicial to the welfare of the kingdom. A decretal issued by Pope
Honorius III in 1220, objecting on this ground to a purported alienation by
the monarch of Hungary, was an important early articulation of this idea.
But there was still room for uncertainty as to whether transfers in violation
of this principle would actually be null and void, or whether they would
merely be acts of personal wrongdoing on the native monarch’s part (with
the transferee receiving good title nonetheless).
Claiming the Sea
If, in the Americas, the chief concern of the non- Hispanic states was to fi nd
bases of title of their own to their colonial territories, the challenge in the
Eastern Hemi sphere was very diff erent— and so was the response from the
arriviste Eu ro pe ans. In the Western Hemi sphere, the Spanish (and their fel-
low Eu ro pe ans later) had been concerned to justify their title to the land.
Th ey largely left the sea to look aft er itself. In the Indian Ocean world, in
contrast, the Portuguese faced a series of well- established states that they
were unable to defeat or dislodge, as the Spanish had done in the New
World. Th e reason, in large part, was that the Asian populations had prior
exposure to the diseases that the Eu ro pe ans carried— unlike the American
Indians, whose population was reduced by some 90 percent in the wake of
the Spanish conquests. Moreover, these Asian states had long experience of
their own in international relations— including, of course, the two standard
categories of state practice, diplomacy and treaty making.
What the Asian states do not appear to have had (so far as can be pres-
ently discerned) is any signifi cant doctrinal tradition. Th at is to say, there is
no evidence that they thought about interstate relations in terms of some
underlying systematic philosophy of human social conduct analogous to the
natural- law system of the Eu ro pe an states. It would be rash to assume, how-
ever, that the states of the Indian Ocean basin had made little advance be-
yond, say, the city- states of ancient Mesopotamia or the Chinese of the pre-
imperial era. It is possible that future research will bring great changes to
our current state of knowledge in this regard.
What is clear is that the Portuguese, soon aft er their initial arrival on the
Asian scene in 1498, concentrated on possessing the sea rather than the land.