Introduction

Although it would be both artificial and misleading to attempt too strong a separation between the two phases of Spain's constitutional crisis, the fact remains that the discovery of America was directly responsible for the greater and possibly the more significant portion of her political literature in the age of Erasmus. No one who reads the account of the controversies over the nature and political fate of the Indians which rocked Spain's learned world during the first decades of the sixteenth century can possibly doubt that in the eyes of the Spanish publicists and of the government itself the questions under discussion were of the utmost gravity and import not only for Spain but, more significantly, for the whole political universe of man. To the discovery of America must be credited the appearance of a formidable propagandist for the cause of the Indians in the person of Bartolomé de las Casas, and the erudite work of his determined opponent, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, exponent of a phase of Spanish humanism of Italian vintage and alien to the parallel current of Erasmian humanism. Above all, however, it was the New World and the political problems suggested by its incorporation into the Castilian Crown that bear the major responsibility for the emergence of a political philosophy best embodied in the writings of Francisco de Vitoria and his disciples and successors of the School of Salamanca.