Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483-1546) — the prima-professor of theology at the University of Salamanca — was the Spanish Dominican theologian whose lectures on the Indies (De Indis recenter inventis, c. 1539) and on the law of war (De jure belli, 1539) founded the modern discipline of international law and provided the natural-law framework that the Dutch jurist Huigh de Groot would later cite in Mare Liberum and De Jure Praedae to defend the VOC’s East India trade against Portuguese and Spanish claims of exclusive jurisdiction. Vitoria is cited by Van der Woude in his Van der Woude (1948) as the principal theological authority behind the Dutch legal-political position in the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1609.
The Salamanca lectures
Vitoria’s lectures on the Indies, delivered at Salamanca in the late 1530s, addressed the question of the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. His argument, in summary: the Pope’s temporal power was limited to spiritual matters; the Pope could not grant temporal jurisdiction over the Indies to the Spanish crown; the indigenous peoples of the Indies possessed natural rights to their lands and to self-government; and the Spanish conquest could be justified only on narrow grounds — self-defence, protection of converts, free trade — and not on the broad grounds of papal donation or discovery. Van der Woude, citing Böhm’s Het Recht van Kolonisatie (1936), calls Vitoria “de grondlegger van het moderne volkenrecht”.
The Salamanca lectures were circulated in manuscript and printed in the late sixteenth century. They became known to Dutch jurists — including De Groot — through the channels of European scholarly exchange, and provided the natural-law framework that the Dutch East India trade would later invoke against the Spanish-Portuguese claims of exclusive jurisdiction over the Indian Ocean.
The citation by De Groot
De Groot, writing De Jure Praedae around 1604-1605 on behalf of the VOC’s Heeren Zeventien, drew explicitly on Vitoria. The argument of Mare Liberum — that the seas were free to all and that no power could claim exclusive jurisdiction — was grounded in Vitoria’s natural-law doctrine. Van der Woude quotes De Groot: “Op gezag van Vitoria haalt hij aan, ‘dat de aanleiding tot een oorlog rechtvaardig is, wanneer de vrijheid om handel te drijven wordt verdedigd tegen wie die willen belemmeren’, waaruit volgt, ‘dat de Hollanders een rechtmatige reden hebben gehad om de Portugeezen te beoorlogen’”. The Spanish theologian thus provided the legal-theoretical foundation for the Dutch war against the Portuguese in the East Indies — a paradoxical outcome, given that Vitoria’s lectures had been directed against the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
Significance
Francisco de Vitoria is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal theological authority behind the Dutch legal-political position in the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1609 and the founder of the modern discipline of international law. His Salamanca lectures on the Indies and on the law of war provided the natural-law framework that De Groot would later cite in Mare Liberum and De Jure Praedae to defend the VOC’s East India trade against Portuguese and Spanish claims of exclusive jurisdiction. The Spanish theologian’s role in the Dutch legal-political position is a striking instance of the early-modern European practice of invoking the natural-law tradition against the imperial claims of one’s own confession — a Catholic theologian cited by a Protestant jurist against Catholic imperial powers. The doctrines of Vitoria — freedom of trade, the limitation of papal temporal power, the natural rights of indigenous peoples — would shape international law for three centuries and provide the legal framework within which the Dutch-Atjeh commercial relationship, and the broader Dutch-Indies trade, would unfold.
See Also
- Huigh de Groot
- Mare Liberum
- Twelve Years’ Truce (1609)
- Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie
- Heeren Zeventien
- Founding of the VOC (1602)
- Jan Pieterszoon Coen
- Acheh
- 1609
Source
Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk II (pp. 56-57).
Het Recht van Kolonisatie, by A. H. Böhm (Utrecht, 1936).