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In 1527, the Dominican friar Francisco de Vitoria arrived at the University of Salamanca to take up the chair of prime theology, the most prestigious academic position in Spain. He held it for twenty years, delivering lectures that nobody outside his classroom was supposed to hear. The university’s statutes prohibited the publication of lecture notes without faculty approval. Students ignored the rule and copied everything. The notes circulated in manuscript across Europe. What they contained was an argument, careful, incremental, built from first principles of natural law, that the indigenous peoples of the Americas possessed rights that the Spanish crown could not legally override.
Vitoria never travelled to the Americas. He worked from testimony, from legal texts, from Aquinas, and from the methodological tradition that Salamanca had been building for three centuries. The university of Salamanca history 1218 is, among other things, the story of how an institution founded by a minor Iberian king as a political gesture became the place where the concept of international law was invented.
The king who needed a university
Alfonso IX of León founded the Estudio at Salamanca in 1218, and the circumstances of the founding illuminate what a medieval university was for. Alfonso was not a man who spent much time on disinterested intellectual patronage. He was a ruler perpetually at war with his neighbours, frequently excommunicated, and struggling to maintain the independence of León against the gravitational pull of Castile to the east and Portugal to the west.
A university served several of his purposes at once. It trained the canon lawyers and administrators his court required. It attracted scholars, students, and their money to a city that would become an economic anchor for his kingdom. And it was a visible declaration that León was a realm capable of sustaining the kinds of institutions that marked a civilised Christian kingdom. Alfonso IX’s contemporary, Frederick II of Sicily, had founded the University of Naples in 1224 for similar reasons. The founding of a university was a political act dressed in academic robes.
Alfonso’s foundation was confirmed and given permanent legal standing by Alfonso X of Castile in 1254, after León and Castile had merged under his rule. Alfonso X’s confirmation charter is the document that modern historians usually cite as establishing the university’s formal legal identity. He fixed the salaries of the masters, established a university library, and appointed a rector. Pope Alexander IV followed with a papal bull in 1255 confirming the university’s right to grant degrees recognised throughout Christendom.
The site itself mattered. Salamanca sat on the Tormes river, on the road between Portugal and Castile, in a region where the reconquest had pushed the frontier far enough south that the city was no longer a borderland garrison but a functioning urban centre. By the late 13th century it had colleges, churches, a cathedral chapter, and the kind of dense clerical infrastructure from which a university could grow.
The earliest faculty and what they taught
The 13th-century university was small, unspecialised, and overwhelmingly focused on law. Canon law was the central discipline: the law of the Church, which governed marriage, inheritance, clerical conduct, and the relationship between ecclesiastical and secular authority, was the most practically useful body of knowledge that a young cleric or royal administrator could acquire. Civil law, the Roman law tradition being rediscovered and systematised at Bologna, followed close behind.
Medicine and theology were present but secondary. Grammar and logic formed the preparatory curriculum for students who arrived without the Latin required to engage with the primary texts.
What distinguished Salamanca from the European universities to its north and east was the cultural context in which it operated. The Iberian peninsula in the 13th century was a world of three religions and three scholarly traditions. Toledo, Burgos, and Seville contained significant Muslim and Jewish populations, and the translation movement centred on Toledo had spent a century rendering Arabic philosophical and scientific texts into Latin. Salamanca’s scholars worked in an intellectual environment shaped by this translation culture, even when they were not directly engaged with it.
The consequences of this environment would become visible in the 15th century, when the university’s faculty included figures whose scholarly formation was inseparable from the multilingual culture the expulsions and conversions of 1492 would destroy.
Abraham Zacuto and the sky above Salamanca
Among the scholars working at Salamanca in the 1480s and early 1490s was Abraham Zacuto, an astronomer and mathematician whose family had lived in Castile for generations. Zacuto held a chair at Salamanca, and his work there produced the Almanach Perpetuum, a set of astronomical tables more accurate than any previously available in the Iberian tradition. The tables gave the positions of the sun, moon, and planets across a multi-year cycle, calculated for the meridian of Salamanca.
When Christopher Columbus returned to Salamanca in 1486 to present his proposal for a western route to Asia to the commission assembled by the Catholic monarchs, Zacuto’s tables were part of the intellectual infrastructure the discussion drew on. Scholars familiar with his work participated in the assessment. Whether Zacuto himself had direct contact with Columbus at this stage is uncertain; what is clear is that the Portuguese translation of the Almanach Perpetuum was carried aboard Vasco da Gama’s fleet in 1497 and was used to calculate positions during the voyage to India.
In 1492, following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Zacuto left Salamanca. He went first to Portugal, where he became royal astronomer to João II, and eventually to North Africa. His observatory chair at Salamanca was among the casualties of the expulsion, along with most of the city’s Jewish intellectual life. His astronomical tables survived, continued to be used, and were eventually published in Leiria in 1496, the year before da Gama sailed.
Elio Antonio de Nebrija and the grammar of empire
In the same decade that Zacuto was calculating planetary positions, Elio Antonio de Nebrija was teaching grammar at Salamanca and preparing a publication that would change the history of the Spanish language. Nebrija had studied in Bologna for ten years, returned to Spain steeped in Italian humanism, and set about applying humanist philological methods to Latin and then to Castilian.
The Gramática castellana, published in 1492, was the first grammar of any modern European vernacular language. Nebrija presented a copy to Queen Isabella at the court in Salamanca. When Isabella’s secretary asked him what use a grammar of the vernacular could have, Nebrija reportedly answered that language was always the companion of empire, and that the grammar would serve to teach Castilian to conquered peoples who would need it.
Whether that exchange occurred exactly as reported is uncertain. But Nebrija’s reasoning was not merely rhetorical. He understood that the project of reducing a spoken language to written rules was an instrument of administrative and cultural standardisation. The Gramática castellana was not a scholarly curiosity; it was a technology of governance.
Nebrija taught at Salamanca intermittently across several decades, periodically in conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities over the application of humanist textual methods to scripture. His work on the Latin of the Vulgate Bible, arguing that Jerome’s translation contained errors correctable by philological analysis, made him enemies in the same theological faculty where Vitoria would later work. The university contained, and generally managed to contain, both the impulse toward humanist philological criticism and the conservative theological instinct to resist it.
Francisco de Vitoria and the problem no one else would name
The lectures Francisco de Vitoria delivered at Salamanca between 1526 and 1546 addressed a question the Spanish crown would have preferred left unanswered. Spain had conquered large parts of the Americas. The indigenous populations had been enslaved, displaced, and killed in enormous numbers. The legal justifications offered for this are that the indigenous peoples were natural slaves, that the pope had granted dominion over the New World to the Spanish crown, that conquest was justified by the obligation to spread Christianity, were, Vitoria argued, philosophically incoherent and morally unjustifiable.
His two relecciones on the Indies, De Indis and De Jure Belli, presented as formal academic lectures in 1539, work through each justification in turn and reject it. The indigenous peoples of the Americas were rational beings with natural rights. They had legitimate political communities before the Spanish arrived. The pope had no authority to grant temporal dominion over people who had never been subject to the Church. The obligation to spread Christianity did not justify military conquest. War against peoples who had not attacked Spain could not be just war.
What Vitoria built from these arguments was something that had not existed in quite that form before: a systematic account of the rights that all peoples possessed by virtue of their humanity, and of the constraints that those rights imposed on the conduct of states. The Dominican theologian Bartolomé de las Casas, working in parallel from direct observation in the Americas, was making similar arguments by different means. But Vitoria’s lectures gave those arguments the form of systematic legal philosophy.
The relecciones circulated in manuscript, were published posthumously, and were read across Europe. The 17th-century jurists Hugo Grotius and Francisco Suárez, both working in the tradition that runs back through Salamanca, are the immediate ancestors of what eventually became international law. Vitoria did not invent human rights; he built a philosophical structure that made the concept discussable in terms that lawyers and rulers could engage with.
His successor in the prime theology chair, Melchor Cano, continued this tradition. Cano’s student Domingo de Soto, who had accompanied the Spanish forces in the Americas as a chaplain, brought back testimony that reinforced and complicated Vitoria’s theoretical arguments. The Salamanca School, as this tradition came to be called, was not a single set of conclusions but a method: the systematic application of Thomist natural law reasoning to questions that Aquinas had never faced.
Fray Luis de León and the longest pause in academic history
In 1572, the Inquisition arrested Fray Luis de León, an Augustinian friar and holder of one of Salamanca’s scripture chairs, on charges of heresy. The primary accusation was that he had translated the Song of Songs from the Hebrew original rather than from the Vulgate, thereby implying that Jerome’s Latin was imperfect. He had also, his accusers alleged, spoken favourably of a Hebrew interpretation of Isaiah that did not support the traditional Christian reading.
Luis de León spent four years and eleven months in the Inquisition’s prison at Valladolid. He was eventually acquitted of the heresy charges. In 1576 he returned to Salamanca and resumed his chair.
The story that has attached itself to his return is that he walked back into the lecture hall, looked at his students, and began with the words “dicebamus hesterna die”, “as we were saying yesterday”. This is almost certainly apocryphal. It does not appear in contemporary sources and reads like the kind of story later generations invent to honour a man they admire. What is documented is that he returned to teaching, continued to write, and was eventually appointed Prior-General of the Augustinian order in Spain. He died in 1591.
The story persists because it captures something true about the university’s relationship with the Inquisition across this period. The tribunal had real power over the faculty; scholars were imprisoned, texts were censured, chairs were vacated. But the institution continued. The tradition of academic disputation, the culture of formal argumentation that Vitoria had used to challenge the legal foundations of conquest, proved more durable than any individual prosecution.
The physical university and the people who built it
The architectural fabric of Salamanca is inseparable from its institutional history. The university’s Plateresque façade, carved in the early 16th century in the elaborately decorated style named for its resemblance to silverwork, is among the most photographed pieces of academic architecture in the world. It was carved by craftsmen whose names do not appear in the principal documentary records but who worked under the oversight of masters whose names do: the style is associated with the workshop tradition of Juan de Álava and Juan Gil de Hontañón, both active in Salamanca in the early decades of the 16th century.
The interior of the main schools building contains the lecture hall known as the Aula Fray Luis de León, whose wooden benches have been in use since the 16th century. The university library, established by Alfonso X’s 1254 charter, grew into one of the significant manuscript collections of medieval Iberia. The holdings reflect the institution’s intellectual range: legal commentaries, theological summae, medical texts, and the products of the humanist curriculum that Nebrija helped establish.
The colleges that grew up around the university from the 14th century onward housed students from specific regions or nations and generated their own documentary records. The Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé, founded in 1401 by Diego de Anaya, Archbishop of Seville, was the first of the colegios mayores, the elite residential foundations that shaped the social character of Salamanca in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its statutes, its membership registers, and its correspondence are among the archival materials most relevant to genealogical research into Spanish scholarly families of this period.
Genealogy research note: tracing ancestors at Salamanca
The University of Salamanca’s archives are among the richest in the Iberian peninsula for genealogical research into the period from the 15th to the 19th centuries. The Archivo Histórico de la Universidad de Salamanca (ausa.usal.es) holds the institutional records of the university from its medieval origins, including matriculation registers, degree records, examination results, and college accounts. Researchers should note that the surviving records are not continuous; early medieval documents are sparse, and the archive’s strengths lie in the 15th to 18th centuries.
The Libros de Matrícula, the matriculation registers, survive from 1546 onward and record the names of students, their places of origin, and often their fathers’ names and occupations. A student entering Salamanca in 1580 would be recorded with enough identifying detail to connect him to parish records from his home diocese. The registers have been partially indexed and are available for consultation at the archive; some sections have been microfilmed and are accessible through affiliated research institutions.
The Colegio Mayor records are particularly useful for researchers tracing the scholarly and administrative elite. The Colegio de San Bartolomé, the Colegio de Cuenca, the Colegio de Oviedo, and the Colegio del Arzobispo each maintained membership registers (libros de recepciones) that record the admission of scholars with biographical detail. The published histories of the individual colegios, several of which appeared in the 18th century, serve as partial finding aids for these records.
For researchers working on the converso community, the Jewish converts and their descendants who formed a significant part of Salamanca’s intellectual life in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Inquisition records held at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid contain extensive genealogical testimony. Inquisition proceedings required defendants to establish their family history across multiple generations, and the resulting documents, though generated under compulsion, are among the most detailed genealogical records from this period in Spanish history. The AHN’s Inquisición section is catalogued and partly digitised.
The Catedral de Salamanca archive holds baptismal, marriage, and burial records from the cathedral parish from the 16th century onward, supplementing the university records for families resident in the city. The Archivo Diocesano de Salamanca holds records from parishes across the diocese.
For English-speaking researchers, the records of English and Irish students at Salamanca have particular significance. The English College at Salamanca, founded in 1589 as a seminary for English Catholic priests trained in exile, maintained its own registers. These have been published and are available through the Catholic Record Society. The Irish College at Salamanca similarly documented its students, and these records are a significant source for Irish genealogy of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Researchers with access to Ancestry.com will find that the Spain Civil Registration records (from 1870 onward) and some earlier church records are available through the platform, though the Salamanca archive’s pre-1800 holdings require direct consultation or access through a Salamanca-based researcher.
Named individuals index for University of Salamanca history 1218
| Name | Dates | Role/connection |
|---|---|---|
| Alfonso IX of León | 1171–1230 | King of León; founded the Estudio at Salamanca 1218 |
| Alfonso X “the Wise” of Castile | 1221–1284 | King of Castile and León; confirmed and formalised the university by charter 1254 |
| Pope Alexander IV | c.1199–1261 | Issued papal bull confirming university degree rights 1255 |
| Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada | c.1170–1247 | Archbishop of Toledo; rival institution context in founding period |
| Abraham Zacuto | c.1452–c.1515 | Jewish astronomer at Salamanca; author of Almanach Perpetuum; expelled 1492 |
| Elio Antonio de Nebrija | c.1441–1522 | Humanist grammarian at Salamanca; published first grammar of Castilian 1492 |
| Diego de Deza | 1443–1523 | Theologian at Salamanca; supported Columbus’s project before the monarchs |
| Francisco de Vitoria | c.1483–1546 | Dominican friar; prime theology chair 1526–1546; founder of Salamanca School |
| Bartolomé de las Casas | 1484–1566 | Dominican friar; parallel arguments on indigenous rights; associated with Salamanca tradition |
| Domingo de Soto | 1494–1560 | Dominican theologian; Salamanca School; chaplain with Spanish forces in Americas |
| Melchor Cano | 1509–1560 | Dominican theologian; Vitoria’s successor in prime theology chair |
| Diego de Anaya | c.1357–1437 | Archbishop of Seville; founded Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé 1401 |
| Fray Luis de León | 1527–1591 | Augustinian friar; scripture chair; imprisoned by Inquisition 1572–1576; acquitted and returned |
| Juan de Álava | d. 1537 | Master mason associated with Salamanca Plateresque workshop tradition |
| Juan Gil de Hontañón | c.1480–1531 | Master mason; Plateresque work at Salamanca |
