Indians

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In the twenty-ninth canto of the Paradiso, the poet, in dealing with the spread of the Christian message beyond the boundaries of the known world, recalls that the evangelical law reaches both the Spaniards and the Indians, thus indicating the universal dimension of redemption. The textual form attested is «Indi», placed alongside «Spani» in a list of peoples peripheral to the center of ancient civilization. They are not individual persons but a collectivity evoked as a geographical terminus of evangelization, in parallel with the traditional representation of the extremities of the inhabited world.