The School of Salamanca

Today we remember the message and witness of the first Dominicans of Española who spoke out against the abuses of the Taíno Indians. After arriving to the island in 1510, Antón Montesinos, Pedro de Córdoba, and Bernardo de Santo Domingo spent the better part of the next year discerning what action to take in the face of gross violations of human dignity perpetrated by the “Christian” Spaniards. On the Fourth Sunday of Advent in 1511, Montesinos, with his intimidating stature and skill in preaching, stood before the church community and proclaimed:

I am the voice of Christ in the desert of this island. It would be wise of you to pay attention and to listen with your whole heart and with every fabric of your being… You are all in mortal sin. You live in it, you die in it. All because of the cruel tyranny you exercise against these innocent peoples. Tell me, by what right and with what justice do you so violently enslave these Indians? By what authority do you wage such hideous wars against these people who peacefully inhabit their lands, killing them by unspeakable means? How can you oppress them giving neither food nor medicine and by working them to death all for your insatiable thirst for gold? And what care are you providing them spiritually in teaching them about their God and creator, so they are baptized, hear mass, and keep holy days? Are they not human beings? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obligated to love them as you love yourselves? Do you not understand or feel this?

Needless to say, their message was not well received. Diego Columbus, the son of the Admiral and governor of the island, joined a mob of angry Spaniards as they banged on the door of the Dominican house. They wanted to see Montesinos. Fray Córdoba opened the door and informed the crowd that the message was unanimous yet he managed to calm them down for the moment. The Dominicans came back the next week and preached a message even more uncompromising: whoever did not free their Indian slaves would be denied absolution in confession.

This radical discplinary measure of excommunication as a spiritual strategy for reforming souls and rectifying injustice was precisely what changed the direction of Bartolomé de las Casas’ life. Las Casas had been a slave-owner himself. It began when his father brought back a Taíno from one of the early voyages with Christopher Columbus. Las Casas likely brought the slave with him to Salamanca as a teenager when he studied canon law.

As an adult, Las Casas continued this practice until his conscience was awakened by the preaching of the Dominicans. While he prepared to offer Mass for the feast of Pentecost in 1514, he read the divinely-inspired words of Sirach 34 with an open heart:

Ill-gotten goods offered in sacrifice are blemished. Gifts from the lawless do not win God’s favor. The Most High approves not the gifts of the godless, nor for their many sacrifices does he forgive their sins. Like the man who slays a son in his father’s presence is he who offers sacrifice from the possessions of the poor. The bread of charity is life itself for the needy; he who withholds it is a man of blood. To take away another’s living is to commit murder; to deny a laborer wages is to shed blood.

Las Casas eventually freed his slaves thereafter and devoted his entire life singularly to the cause of the Indians. On the feast of Our Lady’s Assumption that same year, he preached a similar message as the one proclaimed by the first Dominicans in 1511. No one believed. When he wrote volume three of his history of the early Spanish conquests, he echoed the first Dominicans: “By what right and justice” do the Spaniards declare against and threaten the natives? (c. 58) Las Casas concluded that all the wars waged by the Indians against the Spaniards and Christians were just.

The legacy of the first Dominicans returned back to Spain to inspire the university where they received much of their theological training. At the University of Salamanca in the 1530s, Francisco de Vitoria reports in a letter to Miguel de Arcos that he does not understand the justice of the war waged by Pizarro against the Incas. According to the testimony of Dominican eyewitnesses like Vicente de Valverde and Bernardino de Minaya, the Inca Atahualpa and his people never committed the slightest injury against the Spaniards.

While Vitoria never fundamentally questioned a possible claim for Spanish conquest, Domingo de Soto did in his Relectio de Dominio given in 1535. Soto, in the words of David Lupher, offered “a bold challenge to the legitimacy of Spanish dominion in the Indies.” And it was boldly asserted in his question, “By what right do we maintain rule in the lands being discovered across the Atlantic?” Then, his answer: “In truth, I do not know (ego nescio).”

The courage to question Crown policy regarding war and to fundamentally reject the institution of forced Indian labor was a direct legacy of the first Dominicans in the New World. They inaugurated what we might call a discourse on rights rooted in a committment to love of God and neighbor. The Indians, in their eyes, were persecuted neighbors made in the image of God. Let us remember and honor their unprecedented contribution to the Church and to humanity exactly five hundred years ago.

The History of the Indies, written over the course of Bartolomé de las Casas’ life as a Dominican, is an incredible work with so many richly detailed narratives that span the fifteenth-century Iberian conquests and the conquest of Mexico in the 1520s. One amazing story that is worth relating comes from Book III, ch. 99, where we find Las Casas, following his failed stint with the Hieronymite friars on Española, back in Spain defending the cause of the Indians to the royal council of the new monarch Carlos V. Under the request of fray Reginald de Montesinos, the brother of the famous Antonio, a junta at Salamanca was summoned by the prior of San Esteban, Juan Hurtado de Mendoza.

Las Casas tells us that thirteen theologians and jurists from the university and convent signed a document that contained four or five conclusions regarding the rational capacity of the Indians and their freedom to receive the Gospel. One can only assume by peaceful means. The conclusions were proposed at the very height of Spanish debates regarding the encomienda institution on the islands across the Atlantic and the doctrine of quasi-natural slavery used to support it. The signatories agreed that anyone who rejected these conclusions should be subject to punishment as a heretic.

Unfortunately, the charter was stolen from Las Casas during one of his journeys after he had received it from Hurtado and translated it. In the words of historian Lawrence Clayton who has written a new biography of Las Casas, the charter, which preceded the papal bull of Paul III by two decades, remains “a major building block in the history of human rights.” I concur. Where is Dr. Jones when you need him?

In the post-Shoah world that we inhabit that has documented and witnessed cases of genocide targeting countless members of different ethnicities, tribes, and religions, the subject of mass violence is implacable to moral reflection. Most accounts of twentieth-century political violence explain such unspeakable crimes in terms of an absence of human empathy as the principal culprit. The emergence of a modern techno-bureaucratic rationality that partitions public morality from a private one and separates means from ends belongs to the insidious background of these atrocities. Human beings become instruments stripped of any kernal of dignity. They are less than human, and therefore, disposable.

I am persuaded by much in this interpretation. Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century provides such a narrative. Even though his version of secular humanism is normatively thin, his diagnosis of the problem seems so right in many ways. When the Nazis shifted their anti-semitism from zealous hatred to a cool, calculated machinery of killing (e.g. “the night of broken glass”), we see the monstrous realization of an iron cage ethics.

When turning to the violent practices and institutions exported to the New World under Catholic Spain, however, such interpretations do not apply so well. The encomienda, for example, was an institution that forced Amerindians to work, often against their will, for the benefit of the Spaniards. But it also had the explicit aim under the Crown of protecting and instructing Amerindians in the faith.  One observes a more paternalistic model of violent relations in this case that contrasts with a model of extermination as a final solution. There was, it seems, a distinctively “Christian” vice operative in the sixteenth century under the guise of love.

Surely, there were numerous cases of outbursts of violence against innocent natives. But these were radically  inconsistent with public policy. Conversion to the faith requires one’s subjects to be living, not dead. The Spanish government established Audiencias or royal courts as a strategy for controlling the unchecked whims of conquistadores and encomenderos  by protecting the claims of Indians who were, according to the Spanish King, his vassals.

The project of genocide so characteristic of modern social darwinisms should not be confused with the colonialist project aimed at paternal care of “meek, simple and unarmed” subjects. For lack of a better term, it seems more accurate to understand the Indians as puerilized (or imagined as children unable to govern themselves) rather than dehumanized in this process. Some historians and ethicists may argue that the two concepts are mutually reinforcing and virtually indistinguishable when it came to actual practices. I beg to differ, even though such dehumanizing rhetoric was both strong and did instigate violence in certain cases. There was something similar to this going on the Middle Ages toward the Jews and Muslims during the Crusades as well.

I think  Russell Jacoby’s Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present (see an overview by author) might get at this point from another angle. Jacoby tries to disabuse his readers of the perception that violence throughout history has always been elicited by the encounter with the stranger. He focuses on the form of violence that results from people in close proximity who struggle over subtle but definitive aspects of identity. Based on reviews of the book, he seems to overstate his case. Nevertheless, the practice of paternalistic or fraternal violence should be highlighted as something distinct and painfully closer to home.

As moderns we seem to think it is the procedure of making less than human that makes us more prone to violence neglecting the fact that the oldest and most frequent form of violence has not been toward those deemed less than human, but those closest to us–our family. It is this phenomenon of domestic violence and physical abuse that helps us to understand the nature of medieval society, the early modern wars of religion in Europe, and Amerindian violence in the New World.

Domestic violence sometimes begins with an attempt to impose a kind of discipline that degenerates into harmful misconduct. That is what was at stake in the arguments of Las Casas, Soto, and Cano, and others at Salamanca. They needed to demonstrate that Amerindians not only had the right to their own lands and possessions (dominium rerum), but were also endowed with the right to govern themselves (dominium iurisdictionis). Whether they lived in less stratigraphic societies like the Tainos or highly-complex ones like the Incas, the natives were not children running around in William Golding-like fashion. Those who differed in their outlook, most especially Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, wanted to view the Indians as heretics like children gone astray and hence deserving of its form of punishment–enslavement and the dispossession of  lands and goods.

Of course, Sepúlveda went so far as to call the Amerindians “homonculi” (or ‘sub-human’). The Catholic Kings never did; but they also never tried to repress such rhetoric or condemn it as heresy, as far as I know.



Francisco de Vitoria is arguably considered a pioneer in the formation of modern international law (see, for example, Georg Cavallar’s The Rights of Strangers). His Renaissance retrieval of the concept of ius gentium served as a basis for the following claim: “Amongst all nations it is considered inhuman to treat strangers and travelers badly without some special cause. On the contrary, it is humane and dutiful to behave hospitably to strangers.” (De Indis, q.3, 1; cf. Cicero De Officiis, 3.11) The law of hospitality, as Cicero once wrote and Vitoria echoes, demands that a city requires strangers to enter into it and be provided for within its walls. Critics here generally attack what Vitoria called the right of communication and travel (ius peregrinandi) as a pretext for invading foreign lands and justfying conquest through “worldwide consensus,” or, in other words, European Ibero-Catholic consciousness. Yet these critiques have the tendency to exaggerate Vitoria’s project by dehistoricizing him and unjustly viewing him as a mouthpiece for conquest (I am thinking here especially of The American Indian in Western Legal Thought by Robert Williams).

While it is not my intention to give Vitoria a fair reading at this juncture, it is worth noting that strong critics of Vitoria and the School of Salamanca tend to see him as stuck in a medieval worldview whereby religion (i.e., the Church) has a formative and constitutive role in the shaping of culture. This is really an historical question about the meaning and definition of Christendom. What is assumed by the strong critics (oftentimes liberal but even postcolonial perspectives) is the dogma that nothing prior to the seventeenth century, or the Radical Enlightenment, or the UN, or the Second Vatican Council (or ever), could understand and defend rights in a universal sense, irrespective of creed and culture. In other words, nothing premodern in the West –whether it is the Spanish Vitoria or the medieval world that preceded him — can be tied to a legitimate concept of universal rights because of the oppressive form of religiosity characeteristic of the Latin West. It was, after all, “a persecuting society” as R.I. Moore says.

It is on this score that I find the speech delivered by Pope John Paul II to the UN in New York City in 1995 especially noteworthy:

In reality the problem of the full recognition of the rights of peoples and nations has presented itself repeatedly to the conscience of humanity, and has also given rise to considerable ethical and juridical reflection. I am reminded of the debate which took place at the Council of Constance in the fifteenth century, when the representatives of the Academy of Krakow, headed by Pawel Wlodkowic, courageously defended the right of certain European peoples to existence and independence. Still better known is the discussion which went on in that same period at the University of Salamanca with regard to the peoples of the New World.

Although this is a blog on the School of Salamanca, it is only fitting to give credit to that earlier Polish school of thought JPII mentioned. The figure referred to here, Paulus Vladimiri, was a canon lawyer chosen to represent Poland at the Council of Constance (1414-1418) in its struggle against the claims of the Teutonic Order regarding the just treatment of the infidel peoples of Lithuania. The Teutonic Knights had little patience and tolerance for the Polish recognition of dominium (self-rule and possessions) among unbelievers. The Grand Master claimed the Order had a special grant from the papacy to conquer and subjugate the pagans of Lithuania for the purpose of making them true Christians. Sadly, they did. However, this did not prevent the passionate Polish lawyer for making his case against unjust papal concessions. The pope simply cannot give away something (in this case, the territory of infidels) that is not within his power to do so. Combining medieval canon law thinking (esp. Innocent IV) and the scholasthic theology of Aquinas, Vladimiri devoted much of his professional life to this social crisis by incontrovertibly defending the rights of infidel peoples. For this reason, JPII was right to locate him in the Western narrative of the development of international law.

Make no mistake though, Vladimiri was not a “modern” thinker like Vitoria or Soto (this point has been disputed by Carl Schmitt who viewed Vitoria as premodern). The School of Salamanca began with the presupposition that the pope was not the lord of the world and had no temporal power whatsoever over infidels. As a canonist shaped by the medieval tradition of papal monarchy, Vladimiri followed Innocent IV and most other canon lawyers in recognizing the papal fullness of power (plenitudo potestatis) claims characteristic of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His biblical proof for this claim came from Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel of John: “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock and one shepherd.” (10:16) With this interpretation, Vladimiri understood the pope as the single representative on earth having universal jurisdiction over everyone.

Of course, in facing the violent Knights, Vladimiri clearly understood how easily papal power could be used and abused to dispossess and conquer those most vulnerable. In order to address this limit in the existing canon legal thought, he argued that the only role of the pope when intervening in pagan nations was to protect, not to cause injury by depriving them of their dominium. The rhetorical evidence for this can be found in his frequent critiques of Roman imperialism and conquest. To make this case in the Lithuanian example, he applied the just war criteria of Innocent IV with rigorous clarity to argue, against the Knights, that war was in no way acceptable. He went so far as to claim that normal judicial process was demanded of any nation accused of violating natural law or the law of nations to the detriment of other peoples.

Premodern, undoubtedly. But Vladimiri’s theory was no less universal in scope than the claims of international law today. The fractured narratives of modern liberals can’t bear the continuity with the heritage of the Latin West. It is clearly there even amidst the stark differences regarding institutional frameworks for implementing the force of law. One way to begin to tease this out is Harold Berman’s classic Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Ironically, there are plenty of Christians (students of Strauss or Villey or Fortin) who reinforce this division between classical and modern, objective rights and subjective rights, in order to favor the ancient regime of law over the new. And yet they still want religious freedom in its characteristically modern, American mode. I think JPII had a deeper insight here that offered an alternative outlook by recalling the claims of conscience made historically on behalf of strangers. That desire is a universal one and yet Vladimiri is noteworthy in that he defended those outside his religious community by struggling against those within it. Jesus and Paul did it before him and Vitoria and Las Casas did it after.