Right to rule
In Quod super his, Innocent IV asked the question, "[I]s it licit to invade a land that infidels possess or which belongs to them?" and held that while infidels had a right to dominium (right to rule themselves and choose their own governments), the pope, as the Vicar of Christ, de jure possessed the care of their souls and had the right to politically intervene in their affairs if their ruler violated or allowed his subjects to violate a Christian and Euro-centric normative conception of Natural law, such as sexual perversion or idolatry. He also held that he had an obligation to send missionaries to infidel lands, and that if they were prevented from entering or preaching, then the pope was justified in dispatching Christian forces accompanied with missionaries to invade those lands, as Innocent stated simply: "If the infidels do not obey, they ought to be compelled by the secular arm and war may be declared upon them by the pope, and nobody else." This was however not a reciprocal right and non-Christian missionaries such as those of Muslims could not be allowed to preach in Europe "because they are in error and we are on a righteous path."
A long line of Papal hierocratic canonists, most notably those who adhered to Alanus Anglicus's influential arguments of the Crusading-era, denied Infidel dominium, and asserted Rome's universal jurisdictional authority over the earth, as well as the right to authorize pagan conquests solely on the basis of non-belief because of their rejection of the Christian God. In the extreme, the hierocractic canonical discourse of the mid-twelfth century, such as that espoused by Bernard of Clairvaux, the mystic leader of the Cisertcians, legitimized German colonial expansion and practice of forceful Christianisation in the Slavic territories as a holy war against the Wends, arguing that infidels should be killed wherever they posed a menace to Christians. When Frederick the II unilaterally arrogated papal authority, he took on the mantle to "destroy convert, and subjugate all barbarian nations", a power in papal doctrine reserved for the pope. Hostiensis, a student of Innocent, in accord with Alanus, also asserted that "by law infidels should be subject to the faithful". John Wyclif, regarded as the forefather of English Reformation, also held that valid dominium rested on a state of grace.
The Teutonic Knights were one of the by-products of this papal hierocratic and German discourse. After the Crusades in the Levant, they moved to crusading activities in the infidel Baltics. Their crusades against the Lithuanians and Poles, however, precipitated the Lithuanian Controversy, and the Council of Constance, following the condemnation of Wyclif, found Hostiensis's views no longer acceptable and ruled against the knights. Future Church doctrine was then firmly aligned with Innocents IV's position. The later development of counterarguments on the validity of Papal authority, the rights of infidels, and the primacy of natural law led to various treatises such as those by Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes.
During the Age of Discovery, several papal bulls such as Romanus Pontifex and more importantly inter caetera (1493) implicitly removed dominium from infidels and granted them to the Spanish Empire and the Portuguese Empire with the charter of guaranteeing the safety of missionaries. Subsequent rejections of the bull by Protestant powers rejected the Pope's authority to exclude other Christian princes. As independent authorities, they drew up charters for their own colonial missions based on the temporal right for care of infidel souls in language echoing the inter caetera. The charters and papal bulls would form the legal basis of future negotiations and consideration of claims as title deeds in the emerging law of nations during the period of European colonization.
The rights bestowed by Romanus Pontifex and inter caetera have never fallen from use, serving as the basis for legal arguments over the centuries. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh that as a result of European discovery and assumption of ultimate dominion, Native Americans had only a right to occupancy of native lands, not the right of title. In the 1831 case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, famously described Native American tribes as "domestic dependent nations". In Worcester v. Georgia, the court ruled that the Native Tribes were sovereign entities to the extent that the U.S. federal government, and not individual U.S. states, had authority over their affairs. Native American groups including the Taíno and Onondaga have called on the Holy See to revoke the bulls of 1452, 1453, and 1493.
