Francisco de Vitoria

Works

• 1539On the American Indians

  A university lecture asking by what right the Spanish ruled the Indigenous peoples of the Americas; it reviews unjust and possibly just titles to rule; published in 1557.

• 1539On the Law of War

  A second lecture on whether and how a Christian may wage war: only to redress a grave injury, with proportionate means and sparing the innocent.

Position

Vitoria is on the map as the founder of the School of Salamanca, which renewed Thomist theology and applied it to new questions of power, property, trade and the conquest of America. In the Relectio de Indis (1539) he argued that the Indigenous peoples held true public and private dominion before the Spaniards arrived; neither unbelief nor sin had taken it from them. He rejected the titles of discovery, of the emperor as lord of the world and of the pope as temporal ruler of the earth. Other titles he accepted: a natural right of all peoples to travel, trade and preach (ius communicationis and ius praedicandi) and the protection of innocents, whose violation could justify a just war. Here interpretations divide. James Brown Scott (The Spanish Origin of International Law, 1934) called him the father of international law; Carl Schmitt, in “The Nomos of the Earth” (1950), read him as a theologian of the Christian order whose arguments nonetheless served the Spanish appropriation of land; Antony Anghie (2004) sees in the same doctrine the beginning of a colonial international law that bound non-European peoples to norms they had not made and turned their resistance into a cause of war. Suárez and later Spanish scholastics developed his doctrine of the law of nations and just war, and Hugo Grotius drew on him in “The Free Sea” (1609).

Life & context

Francisco de Vitoria was born around 1483 (the Stanford Encyclopedia gives 1486), probably in Burgos; other years up to 1492 have also been proposed. He entered the Dominican convent of San Pablo in Burgos and was sent to Paris, where he studied and taught at the Dominican Collège Saint-Jacques, came into contact with humanist circles and the Thomist revival, and helped prepare an edition of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa. He became doctor of theology in Paris in 1522 and then taught at the Dominican college of San Gregorio in Valladolid. In 1526 he won the prime chair of theology at Salamanca, which he held until his death, and based his teaching on the Summa theologiae instead of Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Besides his regular courses he gave public lectures (relectiones), among them those on civil power (1528), on the Indians and on the law of war (1539). In 1539 Charles V instructed the prior of San Esteban to stop such debates on the titles in the Indies without permission and to collect the written copies. Named for the Council of Trent in 1545, Vitoria was too ill to travel. He died in Salamanca on 12 August 1546; twelve of his relectiones were printed in Lyon in 1557.

Further main works

• On Civil Power (De potestate civili, 1528)
• On Temperance (De temperantia, 1537)
• Theological Lectures (Relectiones theologicae XII, 1557)

Appears in

• Debate ‘War and Peace: When Is Armed Force Justified?’