It’s now 1493, a year since Christopher Columbus thought he landed in India. Pope Alexander VI, seeing that other people might be interested in checking things out over there, jumps into action and issues another papal bull, the Inter Caetera. This decree states that Spain has executive rights to any land “discovered” by Columbus the year before, and also that any land not inhabited by Christians is freely available for “discovery.”
And by “discovery,” the Pope meant that “…barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.”
Treatment of natives in the New World becomes so atrocious even some of the explorers are appalled (see A Very Brief Recital of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de Las Casas). To get around any sort of ethical concerns about being monstrous in the name of God, the Spanish monarchy cooks up the 1513 Requerimiento.