The Requerimiento—a Spanish word meaning “requirement” or “demand”—was a document that was read aloud in Castilian, often without an interpreter, by the Spanish conquistadores of the early sixteenth century to Native peoples in the Americas, demanding that they submit themselves to Spanish rule and to open their communities to Christianity. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI, in the wake of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic, had granted the Spanish monarchy dominion over the New World. The Spanish jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios then composed the Requerimiento in 1513 to justify the subjugation of the American peoples in the name of God, forcing them to accept or face the Spaniards in war. Since the 700s Spain had been embroiled in war with the Moors—Spanish Muslims— trying to expel them from Granada, in southern Spain. Proponents of that war, principally clerics, justified it by saying that the Moors knew of Christ but consciously rejected him; accordingly, they had no rights. The war against the Moors was then used as precedent and justification for subjugating the peoples of the New World.