ABSTRACT
The appropriation of American land and the parallel expropriation of the natives was considered functional to the fundamental goal of converting the Indians, enlarging the Christian Commonwealth. In Land and Sea, Carl Schmitt interprets the early history of Atlantic piracy in the sixteenth century as part of a global civil war traversing the Universality of the Christian Commonwealth centred in Europe. Aeterni Raegis and Inter Caetera, released in the spring of 1493, declared the existence of a Universal mission, the Spanish Empire was meant to perform in the name of the whole of Christianity and, in messianic terms, in the name of the whole of humanity. The pirates who originated with, and sponsored and supported by, Protestant nations the vanguard of a new freedom outside the Universalism of the Christian legal order. The authority of the Pope, the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies claimed an imperium over the Atlantic Ocean, in order to protect and defend the evangelization of the Americas.
