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Vitoria lectured on just causes of war against Indians
Source: Situado and Sabana #82
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PACIFICATION The fourth policy [bearing on the Florida conquest], pacification, grew out of the on-going debate about the rights of Indians, in particular the rights of the nomadic Chichimecas of New Spain's silver frontier. The Chichimecas appeared to have none of the characteristics of human reason and civilitas: cities, magistrates, rulers, laws, industry, commerce, or religion. Spaniards delegated them to the category of savages, which in the opinion of late 16th-century ethnographer Jose de Acosta included the Caribs, many tribes on the tributaries of the Amazon, and all the inhabitants of Florida (eastern North America) and Brazil (eastern South America). Many, perhaps most, of the peoples on the "rim of Christendom" would have to be brought out of the jungles and deserts and reduced to "pueblos enforma ," or towns possessing some kind of social order, before they could hope to live a Christian life. "Near men" roaming about "like wild beasts" should for their own good be confined and taught human ways. But they could not be reduced without war, and the kind of war then being waged consigned them to civil slavery. It was "guerra afuego y a sangre," "a war of fire and blood," without quarter, which meant that the lives of those captured were forfeit to their captors, to be dispatched, held for ransom, or sold as slaves. In the opinion of the learned theologian Francisco de Vitoria, lecturing in 1540 on ''the Affair of the Indies" at the University of Salamanca, the emperor could legitimately wage war on barbarous Indians if they were guilty of impeding the free commerce of nations, or if they prevented the preaching of the gospel, interfering with the free adoption of Christianity, or if their laws and leaders permitted "tyrannies" against the innocent, such as human sacrifice and cannibalism. Valid cause for war did not exist merely because the Indians were uncivilized infieles who lived in mortal sin, rejecting Christianity. (Bushnell SS)
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