Francisco de Vitoria Salamanca’s most consequential lectures were delivered in 1539 in front of the assembled faculty of the University of Salamanca, in which Vitoria argued, systematically and publicly, that the Spanish conquest of the Americas had no legal basis, that indigenous Americans possessed rights the Crown was violating, and that the Pope had no authority to give away other people’s lands: positions that challenged the entire legal architecture of the Spanish empire and that the Emperor Charles V tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress.
Vitoria died in 1546 without publishing a word of this argument himself. His students collected and circulated his lecture notes. Hugo Grotius read them, cited them, and built on them a century later. The discipline now called international law traces one of its two main founding lines directly to a Dominican friar holding the prime chair of theology at Salamanca who decided, in his early fifties, that silence on the question of what was happening in the Americas was not an option.
Origins and the Dominican formation
Francisco de Vitoria was born around 1486 in Burgos, in the kingdom of Castile. The precise date is not recorded and his family background is incompletely documented. He entered the Dominican order at the convent of San Pablo in Burgos as a young man, probably in his mid-teens, which was the normal pattern for religiously-inclined boys of modest but respectable family in Castile. The Dominicans in Burgos had a tradition of sending promising students to Paris, and Vitoria was identified as one of them.
He arrived at the Collège Saint-Jacques in Paris around 1509. He would remain there for fourteen years. The Collège Saint-Jacques was the Dominican house of study in Paris and it stood at the centre of the most intense theological and philosophical argument in Europe. Vitoria was in his early twenties when he arrived and in his late thirties when he left. Everything that mattered in his intellectual life was formed there.
Paris and the recovery of Aquinas
The most important thing that happened to Vitoria in Paris was meeting Pierre Crockaert, a Belgian Dominican who had converted from nominalist philosophy to Thomism and who was working on a new edition of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae as a teaching text. Crockaert had replaced the standard textbook of medieval theology, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, with Aquinas’s Summa in his lectures. This was not a small change. Lombard had organised theology as a set of questions and distinctions; Aquinas had organised it as a coherent system grounded in natural law. The shift in teaching text changed the questions the students learned to ask.
Vitoria worked with Crockaert closely enough to assist in editing the 1512 edition of Aquinas’s Secunda Secundae, the part of the Summa dealing with ethics and justice. He then went on to produce his own lectures and eventually held a chair at Saint-Jacques. John Mair, the Scottish theologian who taught at Paris in the same period and whose students included John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola, was a contemporary there. The intellectual climate was exceptional and Vitoria absorbed it fully before returning to Spain.
The chair at Salamanca
Vitoria returned to Spain in 1523 and taught for three years at the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid. In 1526 he was appointed to the prima chair of theology at the University of Salamanca, the most senior and prestigious theology position in Spain. He was around forty. He held the chair for twenty years, until he was too ill to lecture, and his tenure transformed the intellectual character of the university.
He taught the Summa Theologiae rather than the Sentences, and the change reached beyond his own classroom. His students and colleagues gradually adopted the same approach. By the time of his death, Thomism as a living intellectual method had replaced Lombard as the framework for serious theological work at Salamanca. Domingo de Soto, Melchor Cano, and Diego de Covarrubias all studied under him and all became major figures in their own right. Soto would represent Castile at the Council of Trent. Cano’s Loci Theologici would become the standard work on theological method for a generation. Covarrubias became a bishop and one of the most respected jurists in Spain. The school they came from is called the School of Salamanca, and Vitoria made it.
The broader history of the university in which this took place is covered in the University of Salamanca history.
The question of the Indies
The conquest of Mexico was completed in 1521, the year Vitoria arrived back in Spain. The conquest of Peru followed in 1532. The scale and violence of what was happening in the Americas was known in Spain. Bartolome de las Casas, the Dominican friar who had been in the Caribbean since 1502 and who had watched the destruction of indigenous societies at first hand, was pressing his case at court throughout the 1530s. Pope Paul III issued the bull Sublimis Deus in 1537, declaring that indigenous Americans were rational beings with souls, which settled the theological question for those who needed papal authority to settle it. What remained unsettled was the legal question: by what right were the Spanish there at all?
The conventional answers were two. The first was the papal donation: Alexander VI had issued the Inter Caetera bulls in 1493 granting Spain sovereignty over the newly discovered territories. The second was the Requerimiento, a document that Spanish commanders read aloud to indigenous populations before attacking them, informing them of their obligation to submit to the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church, and treating their failure to comply as legal justification for conquest. Both arguments Vitoria found philosophically indefensible, and in 1539 he said so in front of the university.
The arguments and what they cost
The Relectio de Indis, the formal lecture Vitoria delivered in the first semester of 1539, worked through the question of Spanish rights in the Americas with the systematic rigour of someone who had spent thirty years inside the Thomistic framework. He began by establishing that the indigenous Americans were, before the Spanish arrived, the legitimate owners of their lands and the legitimate governors of their communities. They had rational faculties. They had social organisation. They had laws. Nothing in natural law or Christian theology justified the conclusion that paganism or lack of baptism stripped a people of their natural rights.
The papal donation, he argued, gave the Pope no authority he possessed. The Pope’s jurisdiction was spiritual, not temporal, and extended only over Christians. Alexander VI had no power to grant sovereignty over the lands of people who had never heard of Christianity and owed the Church no obedience. The Requerimiento was a legal fiction: a document read in Spanish to people who did not speak Spanish, without interpreters, before attacks that had already been decided on. It satisfied no requirement of just war theory that Vitoria recognised.
He then identified the conditions under which Spanish presence in the Americas could be legitimate: the right to travel, to trade, to preach, the right to defend those who voluntarily converted and were being persecuted for it, and the right to respond to genuine aggression. These were limited, conditional rights, not the unlimited sovereignty the Crown had been exercising.
Charles V was informed of the lectures’ contents before they were even finished. He wrote to the prior general of the Dominican Order and to the rector of the University of Salamanca asking that Vitoria be prevented from discussing these matters further. The letter acknowledged that Vitoria had raised the questions honestly, but argued that public debate of the legality of the conquest was damaging to the Crown’s interests. Vitoria was not silenced. He continued teaching. He was not prosecuted. The institutional support of Salamanca and the Dominican order protected him from the worst consequences, though the lectures themselves were not published in his lifetime.
The law of nations and what came after
The companion lecture, the Relectio de Iure Belli, delivered in June 1539, took the principles developed in the De Indis and worked them into a theory of just war applicable between any political communities, not only Christian ones. A just war required a just cause, right intention, proportionality, and legitimate authority. These conditions applied whether the parties involved were Christian states or not. The law that governed the conduct of war was binding on all nations as part of the natural law accessible to reason.
This was the foundation for what Vitoria called ius gentium, the law of nations: a body of law derived from natural reason that governed relations between political communities regardless of religion or geography. It was not his invention from nothing; the phrase came from Roman law and had been in use for centuries. What Vitoria did was give it a systematic philosophical grounding and apply it explicitly to the new situation created by European contact with the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
Domingo de Soto, who had been present for the lectures and whose own work on justice and law developed directly from them, carried this framework into the great debates of the 1540s and 1550s. Las Casas, who shared Vitoria’s conclusions about indigenous rights though he came to them through direct experience rather than philosophical analysis, cited the Salamanca arguments in his confrontation with Juan Gines de Sepulveda at Valladolid in 1550, where the two men debated the question of the just conquest of the Americas before a royal commission. Sepulveda lost the argument, though not the policy.
Death and the longer consequence
Vitoria spent the last two years of his life too ill to lecture. He died in Salamanca on 12 August 1546, aged around sixty. His lectures had never been published under his own hand. They circulated in manuscript copies made by students and in notes taken during the lectures themselves, a form of transmission that introduced variations and errors but also ensured that the ideas survived and spread beyond what formal publication would have achieved in the same period.
The first printed edition of the Relectiones appeared in Lyon in 1557, eleven years after his death, compiled by his student Alfonso Munoz. By the time Hugo Grotius was writing De Jure Belli ac Pacis in the early seventeenth century, Vitoria’s lectures were a known quantity in European legal thought. Grotius cited him explicitly. The twentieth century returned to Vitoria repeatedly: the Nuremberg prosecutors drew on just war theory, the founders of the United Nations looked to ius gentium, and international humanitarian law traced its intellectual genealogy through the arguments Vitoria had set out in two lectures in 1539 that the Emperor had tried to stop.
For the institutional context and the full Salamanca School, the University of Salamanca history covers his contemporaries and the intellectual community he shaped.
Genealogy research note
For researchers with ancestors connected to the University of Salamanca or the Dominican order in sixteenth-century Spain, Francisco de Vitoria is a useful anchor figure because the institutional records surrounding him are relatively well preserved.
The Archivo Historico de la Universidad de Salamanca holds the university’s administrative records from the medieval period forward, including the Libros de Matrícula (matriculation registers) from 1546. These record students by name and origin. For the period before 1546 the records are less complete, but the surviving registers from the 1530s and 1540s include students who attended during Vitoria’s tenure. The archive catalogue is accessible online through the university’s website.
The Archivo General de la Orden de Predicadores (the Dominican order’s central archive) in Rome holds provincial chapter records and priory registers for the Spanish Dominican province, including San Pablo in Burgos where Vitoria entered the order and the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid where he taught before Salamanca. These records document novices, professed friars, and the movement of personnel between houses. Access requires advance arrangement.
For Burgos family records more broadly, the Archivo Historico Provincial de Burgos holds notarial, ecclesiastical, and civil records for the city and province from the sixteenth century. Researchers looking for ancestors in Burgos in the period when Vitoria was a child there, or in the Dominican community at San Pablo, should begin here. The Archivo Diocesano de Burgos holds parish and baptismal records.
The guide to searching university records systematically, including the Salamanca Libros de Matrícula, is covered in How to find your ancestors in historic university records. The English College at Salamanca, which operated from 1589 and whose records document English and Irish Catholic students at the university in the generations after Vitoria, is covered in the English College Salamanca genealogy guide.
Named individuals in this article on Francisco de Vitoria Salamanca
| Name | Dates | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Francisco de Vitoria | c.1486-1546 | Dominican theologian; holder of the prima chair of theology at Salamanca 1526-1546; founder of the School of Salamanca; author of Relectio de Indis and Relectio de Iure Belli (both 1539) |
| Pierre Crockaert OP | c.1465-1514 | Belgian Dominican theologian at the College Saint-Jacques, Paris; Vitoria’s principal teacher; introduced the Summa Theologiae as a teaching text; co-edited the 1512 Secunda Secundae with Vitoria |
| John Mair (Johannes Major) | 1467-1550 | Scottish theologian at the University of Paris; contemporary of Vitoria at Saint-Jacques; his students included Calvin and Loyola |
| Domingo de Soto | 1495-1560 | Dominican theologian; student of Vitoria at Salamanca; represented Castile at the Council of Trent; developed Vitoria’s ius gentium arguments in De Iustitia et Iure |
| Melchor Cano | 1509-1560 | Dominican theologian; student of Vitoria at Salamanca; author of Loci Theologici; held the prima chair after Vitoria |
| Diego de Covarrubias | 1512-1577 | Jurist and bishop; student of Vitoria at Salamanca; president of the Council of Castile; among the most cited Spanish jurists of the sixteenth century |
| Bartolome de las Casas | 1484-1566 | Dominican friar; bishop of Chiapas; campaigned against the destruction of indigenous Americans; drew on Vitoria’s arguments at the Valladolid debate 1550 |
| Juan Gines de Sepulveda | 1490-1573 | Humanist scholar and royal historian; argued at Valladolid 1550 that conquest of indigenous Americans was just; opponent of Las Casas |
| Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor | 1500-1558 | King of Spain as Charles I; wrote to the Dominican prior general requesting Vitoria be silenced after the 1539 lectures |
| Pope Paul III | 1468-1549 | Issued Sublimis Deus (1537) declaring indigenous Americans to be rational beings possessed of souls |
| Hugo Grotius | 1583-1645 | Dutch jurist; author of De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625); cited Vitoria explicitly; transmitted Salamanca arguments into European international law |
| Alfonso Munoz OP | fl. 1550s | Dominican friar and student of Vitoria; compiled the first printed edition of the Relectiones, Lyon 1557 |
Further reading for Francisco de Vitoria Salamanca
- Instituto Cervantes: Francisco de Vitoria – the Spanish state cultural institute’s bibliographic dossier on Vitoria, including primary source editions and major secondary works
- Archivo Historico de la Universidad de Salamanca – holds the Libros de Matricula and administrative records of the university, accessible by appointment and partly catalogued online
- British History Online – for comparative context on natural law theory and its relationship to the Salamanca School arguments
- The National Archives, Kew – holds State Papers Spain (series SP 94) documenting English diplomatic engagement with the Spanish Crown from the sixteenth century
- Portal de Archivos Espanoles (PARES) – for the Archivo General de Simancas and Archivo Historico Nacional holdings on the Council of the Indies and the legal debates of the 1540s
