1494 Treaty of Tordesillas—or, rather, when the Pope drew an arbitrary line down a very badly drawn map to split the New World between Spain and Portugal. The indigenous population who fell into the newly designated Portuguese territories lived differently from those who lived in modern-day Mexico or Peru. There was no large, centrally governed empire like the Aztec or Inca, but smaller, more self-sufficient groups. In the very early years, Europeans made tentative alliances with these tribes, intermarrying and fighting and losing battles and forming new alliances and being captured only to
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