Francisco de Vitoria
Spanish Dominican friar and scholastic theologian (c. 1483–1546), born in Burgos, trained in Paris in the Thomist tradition and professor of theology at the University of Salamanca from 1526, where he founded the so-called School of Salamanca, an influential movement of scholastic thinkers who renewed moral theology and law by applying Aristotelian-Thomist categories to the new political and economic problems raised by Spanish imperial expansion in America. Vitoria is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern international law thanks to his famous relectiones (public lectures) De Indis and De iure belli (1539), in which he examined with legal and moral rigour the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest of the New World, reaching the conclusion, radical for his time, that the indigenous peoples of America were rational beings with full natural rights of property and political sovereignty, and that none of the titles habitually invoked to justify the conquest —neither the papal donation, nor the religious infidelity of the natives, nor their supposed natural inferiority— constituted a legitimate basis for depriving them of their lands or self-government. Vitoria argued that only certain limited circumstances, such as the violation of the natural right of free communication and trade among peoples (the ius communicandi) or the defence of innocents subjected to practices such as human sacrifice, could justify intervention, always subject to strict conditions of proportionality. These doctrines laid the conceptual foundations of future public international law, anticipating notions such as the international community of free and equal nations, the ethical limits of just war, and universal rights inherent to the human condition regardless of religion or culture. Although Vitoria never questioned the ultimate legitimacy of the Spanish presence in America nor entirely rejected the possibility of a just war against the natives under certain circumstances, his method of legal analysis grounded in natural reason and his fierce defence of universal human dignity make him an essential precursor figure of modern international law and human rights.