Francisco de Vitoria, relectio De Indis insulanis (Lyon, 1557)

A Salamanca professor took the question nobody at court wanted reopened — by what right the Indians had come under Spanish rule — and answered it in two halves. The first demolished every title then in use: unbelief takes away no man's property, the emperor is not lord of the world, the pope had no power to give those provinces away. The second supplied new titles, one of which licensed the conquest it had just delegitimised. Both halves are printed here from the sheets of 1557.