Francisco de Vitoria

Francisco de Vitoria was a Dominican theologian and the prime professor of theology at Salamanca, who lectured from the Summa of Aquinas and founded the school of Spanish scholastics that revived natural law. He published nothing; his lectures survive in students’ notes. On the American Indians of 1539 examined the titles by which Spain claimed the New World and found most of them void, and On the Law of War set out when war is just, and together they are the founding texts of international law, which Grotius acknowledged. Charles V asked him to stop discussing the matter, and he did not.