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Spanish conquest of the New World was justified morally through self-serving arguments for Christianizing indigenous peoples and politically through the grandiose division of the known world between Spain and Portugal by Pope Alexander VI at the Treaty at Tordesillas in 1494. Later Spanish colonial administrations largely dismissed Mesoamerican cultural achievements, while dispossessing them of their lands, languages, and heritage. Conquest was also aided by the diseases the Spanish introduced for which indigenous Americans had no immunity.