The school of salamanca and the spanish legal tradition: “ius gentium”, “ius belli”, and the genesis of the international law of war

Abstract

This article reassesses the place of the School of Salamanca in the history of the law of nations by taking war and its limits as the point of entry demanded by recent reception-oriented historiography, which reads doctrinal coherence alongside institutional and political use. Through a situated close reading of Vitoria, Soto, Molina, and Suárez, it reconstructs the normative grammar by which the Second Scholasticism, grounded in renewed Thomist natural law, governs both resort to force and the conduct of war, while distinguishing the discourse’s internal function—moral theology and the forum of conscience—from its external effects within the legal, political, and military architectures of the Spanish Monarchy. It then confronts this repertoire with critical approaches that foreground its imperial entanglements, mapping argumentative continuities, historical discontinuities, and secularizing reconfigurations as the vocabulary circulates into later strategic and juridical traditions, from Grotius to Clausewitz. The article closes by clarifying, in non-teleological terms, the Salamancan lexicon of limits, by assessing its tensions between universalism and domination, and by proposing a methodological criterion for judging contemporary mobilizations of this legacy in debates on restraint of violence, intervention, and automated warfare.