Berkley Center

As my time in Salamanca approaches its end, I have been reflecting on what memories, stories, and lessons I will take away from the beautiful city I have called home for the past months. Mental snapshots of landmarks will surely stay ingrained in my mind—the Plaza Mayor in the heart of the city, the imposing cathedrals that loom high in the sky, the Roman bridge by the Tormes River. Yet what I will cherish most is not these impressive sights visited by countless tourists, but rather one of my classes of just seven people. Called "School of Salamanca," the course explores the beginnings of international rights and law rooted in the work of sixteenth century University of Salamanca professor Francisco de Vitoria and is a testament to the rich intellectual history that the university boasts.

A Dominican theologian who assumed the role of chair of Theology at the university in 1526, Francisco de Vitoria was an immensely popular professor whose opinion was so well respected that it was sought out by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain. Teaching and developing his philosophies in the midst of the Spanish exploration and conquest of America, he came to be one of the first and most vocal critics of the colonizers’ harsh treatment of the indigenous people.

In public lectures to students and university and city officials, Francisco de Vitoria labeled each reason that Spanish nobles and public opinion had generated to justify their violence against them as immoral and illegitimate. He denied that the Pope had universal jurisdiction, rejected that the indigenous people could be viewed as infidels, and denounced Spanish evangelization efforts as hypocritical in their forceful, brutal nature, emphasizing that faith must be an act of free will, not coercion.

Though he admittedly went on to give some judicial arguments that supported Spain’s presence (so as not to completely undermine Charles V and the pope), given the intensely religious underpinnings of Spanish society and culture at the time, these proclamations were especially bold and marked Francisco de Vitoria as a radical thinker very much ahead of his time. Indeed, in an article entitled “Dispossessing the Barbarism,” European medieval historian Anthony Pagden wrote that Vitoria’s was the “most detailed and far reaching discussion of the subject” and “the first to claim that ‘the affair of the Indies,’ as it had come to be called… was a question of the laws of nature.”

In that appeal to the “laws of nature,” he asserted his firm conviction in the intrinsic dignity of all people as a defining, inalienable characteristic of the human condition. Francisco de Vitoria and those who followed his school of thought and formed what is now known as the School of Salamanca advanced the right to life and the right to freedom of thought for all people—principles that seem so fundamental to current Western political thought but that in the sixteenth century were very novel in their application to indigenous people.

As the course has gone on, we have seen how these bases of international and human rights have been molded and codified in modern times, especially in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In our final class period just this week, we discussed the UN’s Millennium Development Goals—whose original “deadline” is this very year of 2015—deeply rooted in the UDHR and thus in turn by some of the essential precepts of Francisco de Vitoria and the School of Salamanca. In fact, the United Nations itself has recognized the influence of Francisco de Vitoria on the advancement of the type of rights it champions, as its headquarters in New York City displays a bust of him and the UN Office in Geneva has an entire room dedicated to him.

And so, as I continue to reflect as I walk through the streets of Salamanca, I feel honored to roam the halls that an influential thinker such as Francisco de Vitoria once roamed and feel humbled to be in a city home to the type of progressive thought that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.