Managing the World: The Development of Jus Gentium by the Theologians of Salamanca in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

Spain was, at that moment, a nation that had just achieved political and religious unification. In 1492 the Catholic kings completed their reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors. The last emir of Granada had definitively crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, taking his followers with him. Granada had become a Christian city and the mosque had been transformed into a cathedral. A policy of religious education and of converting Muslim inhabitants had been immediately begun throughout Andalusia. The same year, 1492, the Jews of Spain were ordered to convert or leave the country. 1492 was also the year Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, soon to be named America. The political and religious authorities of Spain that is, the Catholic kings, the bishops of Spain (in particular the powerful archbishops of Toledo and Seville), and the Inquisition then began to concentrate on effectively controlling the subjugated men and territories. They would no longer permit the inhabitants of the Spanish empire not to be Christian. In the sixteenth century, Charles V, Catholic king of Spain and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, reigned over Spain, the Netherlands, Franche-Comte, parts of Germany and Italy, and half the American continent. How can the world from the western Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the Pacific; from Flanders, Germany, Naples, Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville to Veracruz, Mexico, and the Andes be managed? This was the question that the Spanish powers had to answer in order to grow and endure.