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Only the King Can Do It: Adaptation and Flexibility in Crusade Ideology in Sixteenth-Century Spain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2012

Patrick J. O'Banion
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Abstract

Reforming efforts at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the challenges of Protestantism, the rise of national states, and the reassessment of just war doctrine, had initiated a moment of crisis for crusading by the mid-sixteenth century. Indeed, historians have described these trends as signaling the end of the movement. This article explores the theoretical underpinnings deployed by an elite group of Spanish theologians and churchmen in May of 1567 to shore up their monarch's claim to a lucrative version of the crusade indulgence granted by popes since the fifteenth century. By rehearsing traditional arguments, eschewing those they saw as obsolete, and deploying new ones, these theorists expose the remarkable adaptability of crusading. The integrity of papally sanctioned holy war against the enemies of the faith collapsed in later centuries with the rise of international law and recognition of permanent divisions within the respublica Christiana. Yet, the ability of sixteenth-century Spanish theorists to recast ideology in the face of shifting intellectual, cultural, and social tides indicates the continuing viability of crusading during a period of inchoateness.

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Research Article
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Church History , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 552 - 574
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2012

In the spring of 1567, King Philip II of Spain (r. 1556–1598) found himself in an unenviable position, for Islam was on the move. In recent decades, Ottoman Turks had advanced throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Rhodes had fallen in 1522; Tunis fell briefly in the 1530s. Malta was preserved for Christendom in 1565 by the fortitude of the Knights of St. John, but barely. Barbary corsairs harrowed Christian vessels, Spanish encampments in North Africa were threatened, and raids along the coasts of southern Europe had become all too common. Christian observers saw the death of Sultan Suleiman in September of 1566 not as an end to the conflict but as a brief lull before the storm hit with renewed vigor. The Spanish crown lacked the financial wherewithal to pursue the matter effectively on its own. But allies who could or would commit military resources proved difficult to locate. Desperate, the king turned to Christ's earthly vicar in the hopes of securing a crusading indulgence that would help raise funds for the cause, but the pope resolutely and repeatedly refused the request. In response, the king marshaled his kingdom's intellectual resources to formulate a crusading ideology adapted to the modern age and capable of winning over a mid-sixteenth century pope, hopefully before it was too late to halt the Turkish advance.

That Philip could expect to formulate a crusading ideology suited to the intellectual tempo of his age should come as no surprise. Just as the expression of religious warfare in Spain had always been in transition, so too had the rationale that undergirded it. From the early twelfth century Iberian onward kings, nobles, and prelates appropriated the ideology of Levantine crusading and, in dialogue with popes and papal representatives, began a long process of reconfiguring it to suit the peninsular context.Footnote 1 By the thirteenth century, the ideological thrust of the movement had already undergone numerous permutations. Sometimes it emphasized uniting the Iberian conflict with the Levantine theater, making the holy city of Jerusalem the final goal for a Mediterranean-wide conflict. At other moments, theorists focused on the cult-center of Santiago de Compostela in north-western Iberia and its patron saint, the Apostle James, who became known as matamoros, the moor-slayer, for his miraculous martial apparitions. At yet other times, ideology drew upon a mythical tradition that recast Charlemagne as a proto-crusading king, who had entered Iberia in force and opposed Islamic advances in the early Middle Ages.Footnote 2

Beginning in the fourteenth century, intellectual heirs of the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore, the most influential (and original) eschatological thinker of the Middle Ages, intermingled millenarian expectations with Iberian crusading themes. Now the reestablishment of Christian dominion in Jerusalem was expected to coincide with the Last Days and, many prophesied, would be accomplished by a Spanish king.Footnote 3 By the end of the fifteenth century, the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, found it necessary to justify granting crusade indulgences to millions of non-arms-bearing Spaniards in exchange for alms so that mercenary armies could be paid and modern artillery purchased for the long campaign against Granada.Footnote 4

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Philip II needed once again to balance change against tradition as he labored to persuade successive popes to grant the sort of alms-based crusading indulgences that his great-grandparents had relied upon for victory at Granada. This proved a daunting task in the face of new challenges to the traditional practices and ideological underpinnings of crusading as they had evolved over the centuries. Protestantism, for example, attacked the scriptural validity of both crusading and indulgences, and reform efforts within the Church sought to eliminate abuses and scandal, which were legion in Spain. Moreover, the papacy had grown uncomfortable with the Spanish penchant of laying claim to the leadership of Christendom and its appropriation of a messianic national identity rooted in its crusading success. Philip himself was heir to a dream of universal monarchism that threatened to undermine the preeminence of the pope and, hence, of papally sanctioned holy warfare. And as if this were not enough, sixteenth-century developments in just war thinking eroded the moral theological edifice constructed during the Middle Ages that had helped legitimize not only crusading but religious warfare more generally in the West.

Historians have typically viewed such challenges as the death knells of crusading. Thomas Asbridge, for example, draws a straight line from Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses through the birth of the Enlightenment to the consignment of the crusades to “a dark and distinctly undesirable medieval past.”Footnote 5 Christopher Tyerman makes much of the co-opting of the crusade by developing nation states and their burgeoning bureaucracies.Footnote 6 As secular states co-opted “many of the cultural functions previously centered on a religious vision of the world,” the medieval crusade came to an end.Footnote 7 Jonathan Riley-Smith singles out the influence of Francisco de Vitoria, an early sixteenth-century Dominican theologian to whom we shall return, for his role in the death of crusading. For Riley-Smith, the attempt by Vitoria and his successors to rethink just war fundamentally undermined the moral foundations of crusading.Footnote 8

Yet, these challenges hardly posed an insurmountable problem to crusade theorists in the mid-sixteenth century. This article describes the legitimizing ideologies deployed in the Spanish context at a time of significant crisis, during which preachers, politicians, poets, prophets, and theologians evaluated and recast the theoretical underpinnings of the Spanish crusade. Although thinkers disagreed about the viability of specific ideologies, by rehearsing traditional arguments, eschewing those they saw as outdated, and deploying new ones, these theorists expose the remarkable adaptability of crusading into early modernity. They turned potential challenges on their heads and marshaled them in support of the cause—to their own satisfaction, at least. While this suggests that crusading had not entered the sixteenth century unaltered from its medieval instantiations, it does highlight the enduring “protean quality” of the movement.Footnote 9 Indeed, the sustainability of crusading in a world far removed from its eleventh-century origins was due in large part to that adaptability and the relative ease with which theorists could recast the movement in the face of shifting intellectual, cultural, and social tides.

This article will proceed, first, by sketching the history of the Spanish crusade indulgence and the impediments that arose to its viability at the Council of Trent in 1563. From there, it will consider the attempts by high-ranking theologians and ecclesiastics, whose opinions were solicited by King Philip in 1567, to formulate rationales that might convince the pope to grant the indulgence. Although millenarian and prophetic discourse had been an important part of crusading ideology in Europe (and continued to be in Spain), the opinion papers of 1567 dissociated Spanish crusading ideology from those traditions. Instead, Philip's theologians gravitated toward the burgeoning Dominican neo-Scholastic movement and its reappraisal of the idea of just war as the solid foundation upon which to build the Spanish case.

I. The Cruzada at Trent

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the traditional Spanish crusade indulgence, known as the bula de la cruzada, had taken on a unique form and role. In much of Europe, commuting crusade vows, which frequently entailed paying for another individual to campaign in one's place, became relatively commonplace during the later Middle Ages.Footnote 10 By the mid-fifteenth century, gaining a crusade indulgence merely by giving alms had become the norm in Spain and elsewhere.Footnote 11 During the Granada campaign of 1482 to 1492, the German practice of printing broadside copies of the indulgence and distributing them to almsgivers was adopted.Footnote 12 By the mid-sixteenth century, a Council of Crusade reported directly to the king, and a Commissioner General oversaw an army of preachers, treasurers, notaries, and bureaucratic functionaries, who preached the crusade indulgence, gathered alms, distributed broadsides, and tallied, coordinated, and transported funds from the locales to the royal coffers.Footnote 13 There, they were earmarked for the defense of the faith and the war against the infidel.Footnote 14 The cruzada cost a modest two reales for most people, and it expired after a period of years—usually three, but eventually just one—after which a new bula had to be taken.

Those who received the cruzada partook of a wide range of graces, most of which had originated as privileges granted to crusaders on campaign.Footnote 15 First and foremost, they gained a plenary indulgence, which could be used twice: once at the moment of reception and a second time in extremis, should the bearer find him or herself in such a state before the expiration of the bull.Footnote 16 Additionally, one could, for instance, eat dairy products or meat (the latter only with the permission of one's medical doctor and confessor) when otherwise proscribed by the Church, receive the sacraments and Christian burial during a time of interdict, establish a portable altar (or oratory), and marry in the third or fourth degree of consanguinity. It also permitted bearers to confess to the priest of their choice rather than to their parish cura, and to be absolved of all sins (except heresy), even those normally reserved to the bishop, pope, or the Holy Office of the Inquisition. These privileges became a necessary part of daily life for the millions of Spaniards who regularly took bulas.Footnote 17

For the king, the cruzada was equally difficult to do without. At the end of the sixteenth century it would generate about 750,000 ducats each year, which made it a vital part of his annual budget of about 6,000,000 ducats.Footnote 18 And yet, much of the time, the practices by which those funds were raised were universally acknowledged to be rife with exploitation and corruption. Preachers were paid on commission and often abused their authority. They promised benefits that were not actually in the cruzada, browbeat or extorted auditors into taking them, and skimmed profits. In rural areas, people frequently complained of being kept from plowing fields or planting crops by preachers who demanded attendance at daily sermons that ended only when enough bulls had been taken.Footnote 19

The Council of Trent, which met in three sessions between 1545 and 1563, sought both moral reform in the Roman Catholic Church and to address the Protestant challenge. The matter of indulgences was one area where those two agendas intersected. On July 16, 1562, the fathers condemned questores, those who sold indulgences on commission, and decreed that henceforth bishops should oversee the publishing of indulgences in their diocese. On December 4, 1563, the Cardinal of Lorraine, head of the French faction, pushed through a Declaration on Indulgences, which recognized their antiquity, pronounced them salutary for Christians, and anathematized anyone who denied them. In spite of these positive assertions, the Council allowed that abuses had “crept therein” and ordained, “all evil gains for the obtaining thereof . . . be wholly abolished.” Yet the diversity of corruptions led the council to avoid denouncing individual examples of “superstition, ignorance, irreverence”; instead, it commanded bishops to collect lists of abuses and forward them to the pope.Footnote 20

What goes unstated in these official decrees on indulgences are the roiling international tensions at play behind them. The Imperialist, French, and papalist factions were often at one another's throats in the debates at Trent; it was no different here.Footnote 21 The French in particular sought an end to the cruzada because of its notorious corruption, because many of its privileges compromised reform efforts, and because it benefitted their Spanish rivals. It was widely understood that the Cardinal of Lorraine had specifically intended his Decree on Indulgences as an attack on the cruzada. Only quick action on the part of Philip II's ambassador to the Council succeeded in ameliorating the language of Lorraine's original decree.Footnote 22

II. The Pareceres of May 1567

If the Spanish escaped Trent without a direct condemnation of their crusade bull, the war was far from over. The council had demanded reform of the abuses associated with indulgences, called for their preaching to be placed under the authority of bishops, and directly challenged several of the privileges granted by the cruzada. Many around King Philip's court feared that, if implemented, such changes would threaten royal revenues. More unsettling yet, from the Spanish perspective at least, since the 1550s popes had grown reluctant to grant the bull of crusade at all, and Pius V (r. 1566–1572), who opposed alms-based indulgences on principle and viewed the Spanish crusade bull as the “worst of examples and a scandal to the whole world,” simply refused to renew it.Footnote 23 Philip and his ministers needed to assert the legitimacy of the cruzada in such a way as to reconcile crusading tradition, reform movements, and the needs of the Spanish state. And with the Turks still on the offensive, this needed to be accomplished quickly.

To that end, after repeatedly failing to gain the cruzada through other diplomatic avenues, in early May of 1567 King Philip requested the opinions (pareceres) of a dozen Spanish theologians and churchmen about the cruzada and its compatibility with Tridentine reforms.Footnote 24 These were a “who's who” of influential figures:Footnote 25

Diego de Chaves, OP (1507–1592)
Bishop Francisco Delgado López of Jaen (1514–1576)
Bishop Fernando Tricio de Arezana of Orense (1515–1578)
Fernando Páez, OFM (d. 1583)
Bishop Diego de Covarrubias y Leiva of Segovia (1512–1577)
Martín de Azpilcueta, OSA (1492–1586)
Antonio de Córdoba, OFM (1485–1578)
Juan de Salinas, OP (1497–1569)
Archbishop Pedro Guerrero de Logroño of Granada (1501–1576)
Mancio de Corpus Christi, OP (ca. 1500–1576)
Bishop Gregorio Antonio Gallo de Andrade of Oriheula (1509–1579)
Archbishop Gaspar de Zúñiga y Avellaneda of Santiago de Compostela (1507–1571)

These opiners appear a broad and judiciously chosen lot with representatives from three different religious orders and several members of the secular clergy. Most had attended Trent; they were bishops, archbishops, provincials of mendicant orders, and royal confessors; some held or had held lofty academic appointments at the Universities of Salamanca or Alcalá; others were theological authorities of international standing. Some dared to dwell upon the defects and abuses, but most respondents walked a party line, asserting the cruzada's compatibility with Trent and its importance in the fight against the infidel. Those who viewed it as incompatible with Tridentine reforms nevertheless tended to argue that the Turkish threat made the Spanish crusade bull necessary. In either case, these pareceres provide a window into the evolving nature of the ideology that undergirded Spanish crusading as it was understood by high ecclesiastical office holders and influential theologians in the late 1560s.

No surprise that all respondents cast their answers in terms of the clear and present danger of waxing Muslim power in the Mediterranean, but beyond that general theme several important nuances can be detected. Here a useful (if clearly arbitrary) taxonomy will be imposed upon the justifications deployed in the pareceres by placing them into three categories: those based upon financial need, those upon tradition, and those that represent reactions to current events. These classifications do not do full justice to the range of arguments, which often spanned multiple categories. But they will, at least, give some form to the flow of contemporary controversies and debates in order to demonstrate how they informed and shaped the ideology of sixteenth century crusading.

Efforts to justify the cruzada financially stemmed principally from the fact that King Philip needed money to withstand the Muslim threat. Indeed, the kings of Spain had impoverished themselves, their vassals, and their kingdom specifically (or so it was claimed) as a result of the vast sums spent defending the Church and Christendom. As Martín de Azpilcueta, an internationally recognized legal, economic, and moral authority put it, “His Majesty is quite spent because of the wars of the past and the present.”Footnote 26 Similarly, the Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela explained, “The needs of the kings of Spain were and are . . . so great and they have spent much of their patrimony in service of the church in defending provinces and acquiring new ones.”Footnote 27 The Dominican provincial of Castile, Juan de Salinas, thus saw it as a worthy thing for the pope to “concede the cruzada as in times past, both because of the opposition of the infidels . . . and the poverty of so Christian a king and kingdom.”Footnote 28 With the indulgence granted, the financial dearth would be amended. Hence, Azpilcueta claimed, “The principal cause for which the said indulgence is conceded is the great sum of money that is necessary for such a great and pious war.”Footnote 29 The Dominican royal confessor, Diego de Chaves, explained that effectively opposing the power of the infidel “cannot be done without a large sum of money.”Footnote 30 If resisting the enemies of the faith was the goal, money was necessary; since the conflict was one that affected the whole of Christendom, that money ought to come via a papal crusading indulgence.Footnote 31

The second general category of justifications for the cruzada may broadly be described as based upon tradition. The opiners sometimes drew directly from law codes, but more frequently they legitimized the cruzada with reference to the conventionally appropriate way of ruling and governing Christians, the Church, and Christendom. From the beginning of the crusading movement, popes and preachers had emphasized the goal of liberating Christians from the “oppression and ravages of the Muslims”; so too here.Footnote 32 Daily, the Christian people living on the coasts of Spain were not merely assaulted by the Turks and Barbary pirates but even captured and carried away by them.Footnote 33 The possibility of kidnapped Christians raised the threat of their conversion to Islam and indeed the conversion of the whole peninsula should the Muslim advance not be halted. However, as Diego de Chaves argued, in cases of dire necessity bishops could ransack their own churches and use the loot to redeem captive Christians who might otherwise convert to Islam. If a bishop could do this “to keep thirty or one hundred men from denying the faith,” why could not the pope perform a similar action in granting the cruzada? If he failed to do so, Spain would be lost. But if he granted it, the pope would preserve the souls of all the Spanish Christians from that day until judgment day.Footnote 34

Beyond safeguarding the Church generally and the protection of imperiled Christians, there was also the traditional obligation of protecting Christian lands, since those lands were part of the respublica Christiana. Here we approach the rationale of medieval crusaders who sought to restore the patrimony of Christ by conquering the Holy Land or who depicted Livonia as the Virgin's dowry.Footnote 35 Yet, the opiners claimed no such precise rationale. Similarly absent is any anticipation of recapturing formerly Christian lands such as North Africa or the Levant, let alone Jerusalem itself. Nor can one hear an apocalyptic strain in these writings. As we shall see, this is the more remarkable given that crusading in early modern Spain was often tied to eschatological expectations of ongoing triumphant reconquest. Instead, the opiners merely asserted that without cruzada revenues, Christian lands would fall to the Turk and that this, in itself, was obnoxious. If they did not resist the Muslim advance today, asserted Salinas, “tomorrow [the Turk] will enter Italy and all of Spain.” No vestige will remain “of that which the apostles founded, but only the houses of Satan.”Footnote 36

The arguments from tradition also looked to the behavior of previous pontiffs as the model for the current one. The popes of the past had always seen such threats as deserving of a crusade indulgence, and given the greater need that now existed, Pius V should not hesitate to concede the cruzada. Fernando Páez explicitly connected the indulgences offered by Urban II for the First Crusade to their sixteenth-century Spanish iteration.Footnote 37 Chaves explained, “Since so many popes, with mature counsel and long deliberation, have so many time previously conceded this cruzada . . . it does not seem to be something that his Holiness can now stop doing, having greater reason for giving it than his predecessors.”Footnote 38

The opiners frequently coupled arguments from tradition and precedent with assertions of the need to protect the authority of the pope, and here we arrive at the third broad category: responses to contemporary challenges. These tend to be intriguing arguments for they expose the impact of current events and debates on the evolution of early modern crusading ideology. Some of the respondents, for example, argued the pope's refusal to concede the cruzada would inadvertently validate Protestant critiques of indulgences, which would “scandalize the good and catholic people” of Spain.Footnote 39 Moreover, if the pope did not renew the bull of crusade, those who were already poorly disposed toward indulgences and papal authority would read the revocation as proof that “the pope or the church had used some frauds or done evil and erred in conceding such bulls of indulgence and privileges” in the past.Footnote 40 To avoid scandalizing the faithful, tacitly conceding the criticisms of heretics, and undermining papal authority, the pope had no choice but to continue the practices of his predecessors.Footnote 41

A second theme that showed the opiners responding to current events was the claim that the Spanish monarch specifically, and he alone, deserved the crusade indulgence at that moment in history. “Only the king can do it,” Salinas pronounced.Footnote 42 “Only he can serve [the Church] in these unhappy times.”Footnote 43 The defense of the Church “in these times,” Antonio de Córdoba claimed, “depends in the larger part or rather in nearly the whole upon the Catholic Kings of Spain, since they are the only ones whom we see warring regularly against the infidels.”Footnote 44 While the opiners never spelled out precisely why they espoused this Spanish exclusivity, it seems to have been closely linked in their minds with the fact that, just as his predecessors had led the charge against the enemies of the faith in the past, so Philip had now taken up the mantle, defending Christendom and warring against the infidel in the present.

Yet this argument displayed a peculiar weakness; it encouraged the pope to grant the bull of crusade to Spain merely on the basis of current royal activity. There was no attempt to stake a claim for a permanent cruzada that would belong to the Spanish crown in perpetuity in spite of the fact that Philip had enthusiastically pursued just such a boon throughout the 1550s and 1560s.Footnote 45 Instead, as Francisco Delgado López, the Bishop of Jaen, suggested, the cruzada should be granted since Philip, like “his predecessor, the kings of glorious memory,” waged war in defense of Christianity “more often than any other Christian prince, and more than all the others put together.”Footnote 46 In other words, this was merely a functional argument; if the king of France or the Venetian Republic were leading the charge, then presumably they would merit a grand crusade indulgence like the Spanish cruzada.

III. Messianism and Millenarianism

These limited claims to Spanish exclusivity deserve further attention, since they draw close to, without actually taking advantage of, another significant discourse often used to promote crusading ambitions in Spain. Absent from the pareceres are claims that God had chosen the Spanish monarch to play a central role in leading a final crusade to overthrow infidels and heretics, unite the world under a single Christian monarchy, and usher in the Last Days.Footnote 47 As outlandish as these notions might sound to modern ears, from the fourteenth century such claims had resonated deeply in Spain and were backed by Joachite readings of biblical texts and prophecies of Last Emperors, new Davids, hidden kings, and universal monarchs derived from a diverse group of vaticinal traditions and the interpretation of astrological signs. Influential millenarian thinkers such as Arnold of Villanova, John of Rupescissa (or perhaps a pseudo-Rupescissa), Francesc Eiximenes, Christopher Columbus, Joan Alamany, and Pietro Galatino foretold glory for Spain, often including the reconquest of Jerusalem and dominion over a global Christendom before the final judgment.Footnote 48

Indeed, millenarian prophecies of this sort played into Philip's own sense of messianic vision and his belief in a universal Hapsburg monarchism.Footnote 49 Such notions had energized his father (Charles V) and great-grandparents (Ferdinand and Isabella).Footnote 50 Bernard McGinn has noted that until about 1600, Catholic exegetes could employ a millenarian reading of the Apocalypse, and this was certainly true for Spain.Footnote 51 Such approaches resonated among many of the Franciscan missionaries sent to evangelize the New World and even among some early Spanish Jesuits.Footnote 52 Poets and political advisors reflected these prophetic dreams back to the king, especially (to get ahead of ourselves) in the wake of Lepanto. But even before the victory of October 1571, Hapsburg messianic self-consciousness was alive and well for Philip II and his Spain.Footnote 53 Yet, the opiners altogether failed to draw upon the prophetic millenarian tradition to legitimize the cruzada.

A variety of reasons may be suggested to explain this omission. First, we might wonder whether intellectuals and churchmen holding lofty appointments snobbishly viewed prophecies and the like as popular modes of theological discourse, unsuited to their more refined tastes. Certainly commoners and the uneducated turned to the prophetic and apocalyptic with some frequency and used them to circumvent the institutional religious authority of the Church.Footnote 54 Nevertheless, it is also the case that many a seasoned theological mind had been lured into the twisting mazes of visionary experiences and eschatological expectation.Footnote 55

We might also consider whether the opiners refrained from including such things because they doubted their appeal to King Philip or Pope Pius V, whom the opiners were ultimately expected to convince. This hypothesis is bolstered, since it appears that the theologians received guidelines (now missing), which coached them in how to answer Philip's questions.Footnote 56 This could well indicate that they were being pressured to pander to the opinions of their superiors. But, again, this explanation only partially convinces. For his part, Philip had already appropriated the messianic self-image; hence, its absence in the pareceres is the surprise. Furthermore, some opiners threw caution to the wind by boldly describing abuses in their responses—so boldly that the royal ambassador, Juan de Zúñiga, found it necessary to cull half of the pareceres and emend the remainder during translation before delivering them to Pius.Footnote 57 If the authors risked offending the king with their frank words, it is unlikely they would they have refused to employ prophetic discourse had they viewed it as a legitimate foundation for Spanish crusading.

A third way of explaining the failure of the opiners to draw upon eschatological prophecies is to suggest they did not believe them to be a sufficient rationale for the cruzada. While this is likely, it needs to be set within a broader context. That context was conditioned by the arguments that had sprung up beginning in the thirteenth century between the Dominican and the Franciscan Orders. Belief in prophetic claims about the millenarian role of the Spanish monarchs in the dawning of a golden age did not always follow party lines. Nevertheless, many of the strongest supporters came from the ranks of the Franciscan Order, while most of the strongest detractors were Dominicans.Footnote 58 This was partially a consequence of the mysticism inherent in the Franciscan tradition from the beginning, but it was also a consequence of the fact that, since the second half of the thirteenth century, a good many Franciscans had been attracted to the writings of Joachim of Fiore (ca.1135–1202), which opened the door to millenarian speculation. Dominicans, by contrast, tended to reject his writings. Hence, while the great Franciscan scholastic Bonaventure (1221–1274) drew cautiously upon the Calabrian Abbot, his theological counterpart among the Dominicans, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), repeatedly attacked Joachite ideas.Footnote 59

IV. Francisco de Vitoria and Just War

These medieval tensions find an early modern point of contact in the writings of the opiners when we consider two facts: first, that Pius V was himself a Dominican—the first Dominican pope since the early fourteenth century—and, second, that just one month previous to the production of the pareceres, Pius had named Thomas a Doctor of the Church. This in turn prompts us to take a closer look at the men chosen to offer their opinions about the cruzada. Initially, they appeared quite diverse—two Franciscans, an Augustinian, several secular clerics, and three Dominicans. Upon closer scrutiny, however, the group proves to have been crafted to appeal to the Dominican pope and his fondness for Thomas. By and large, the opiners actually represented the flowering of a reinvigorated Thomistic scholasticism that had its roots in the labor of the Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria (1480–1546), whose groundbreaking work on natural law and just war had begun to raise troubling questions about some traditional justifications for crusading. In particular, although prophecies had long been an important component of crusade propaganda, Vitoria questioned the appropriateness of relying upon vaticinal revelations of the divine will as a basis for religious warfare.Footnote 60

Vitoria was one of the chief early figures in the so-called Second Scholastic movement, which centered on the University of Salamanca. Drawing upon Aristotelian concepts developed by medieval theologians (especially Thomas Aquinas), Vitoria reacted against the use of force in the name of Christ to commit atrocities and enslave the inhabitants of the New World.Footnote 61 This, in turn, led him to reconsider precisely what constituted a just war and ultimately to question the Spanish claim to dominion in the Americas. In brief, the Vitorian school, which by the second half of the sixteenth century exercised considerable influence in Spain, concluded that violence could rarely, if ever, be justified with reference to the will of God, since even pagan nations had the right to defend themselves on the basis of the ius gentium, the law of nations. As a consequence, Vitoria and his disciples found themselves discomfited by the traditional notion that crusaders were fighting in response to specific expressions of the divine will revealed by God and mediated through a papal call to take up the cross. Rather, Vitoria contended that war—even religious war—could only be waged for the sake of the “common” or “public good,” and that notion of common good was determined in accordance with divinely instituted and universally applicable natural law.Footnote 62

There were those, noted Vitoria, who believed Spain ought to wage war against non-Christians because the lands of the latter had been made forfeit to the former by “special gift of God” (ex speciali dono Dei), since He had condemned “barbarians” to “perdition for their abominations, and delivered them into the hands of the Spaniards.”Footnote 63 But even if it were possible that God might do this, how was one to know that He had done so in a specific situation? Vitoria suggested that prophecies might provide such a hotline to the divine will, but immediately dismissed the possibility. It was, he argued, inherently “dangerous to give credit to anyone who proclaim[ed] a prophecy of this kind contrary to common law and the rules of Scripture unless his teaching [were] confirmed by some miracle.” But since those who claimed to know the will of God in war offered no miracles, Vitoria concluded, “where faith or authority or providence shows what ought to be done, recourse should not be had to [spiritual] gifts.”Footnote 64

This type of thinking about just war would prove debilitating to crusading in the long run, but in the short run it actually had much to offer those tasked with justifying the Mediterranean conflict, for Vitoria had pronounced Muslims a somewhat idiosyncratic case. In wars against such an enemy, “peace [could] never be hoped for on any terms.” Hence, “the only remedy is to eliminate all of them who are capable of bearing arms against us, given that they are already guilty.”Footnote 65 While this did not give the Spanish permission to attack Muslims for no reason, it did give them freedom to pursue war having been sufficiently provoked.

Hence, as the opiners crafted their arguments, they frequently found it possible and even useful to draw upon Vitorian language, and this was no coincidence. A remarkable number of them had strong connections to Vitoria and his chief early disciple Domingo de Soto (1494–1560). Bishop Francisco Delgado López of Jaen, had studied under Vitoria and Soto in his youth, as had Bishop Diego de Covarrubia y Levia of Segovia, Archbishop Pedro Guerrero de Logroño of Granada, the Dominican theologian Mancio de Corpus Christi, Archbishop Gaspar de Zúñiga y Avellaneda of Santiago de Compostela, and Bishop Gregorio Antonio Gallo de Andrade of Orihuela.Footnote 66 Diego de Chaves, OP, a royal confessor, had not studied under Vitoria, but had frequently corresponded with and was deeply influenced by him.Footnote 67 The Dominican Provincial of Castile Juan de Salinas had defended Vitoria against their confrere, Domingo de Santa Cruz, when the latter argued in favor of the emperor's dominion in the Indies.Footnote 68 The elderly Augustinian Martín de Azpilcueta had been an influential instructor at Salamanca in the 1530s, working alongside of Vitoria and Soto in the scholastic revival. Even the Franciscan provincial of Castile, Antonio de Córdoba, had embraced Vitoria's position on the non-existence of Aristotelian “natural slaves,” asserting that if Native American were attacked on the basis of their “infidelity and barbarity,” they had the right to defend themselves.Footnote 69

Thus, virtually all of the theologians asked to submit pareceres on the cruzada in May 1567 had drunk deeply from the medieval natural law tradition, especially as it was mediated through the work of Aquinas and the Salamancan reassessment of just war. No surprise that, as a consequence, they tended to draw upon the language of Vitoria, his colleagues, disciples, and the Thomistic corpus, and to work from within a theological framework formed and influenced by the school of Salamanca. A very few examples of this intellectual debt can be illustrated here.

The Bishop of Segovia, for instance, argued that the “public good” of allowing Christians to contribute alms (for which they received indulgences and graces) in order to help in the defense of Christendom was clear. “They don't cease,” he wrote, referring to the daily “invasions and offenses . . . that the infidels commit” against Christians. Consequently, new succor was constantly needed “for the common good of the whole Christian republic, to the defense of which his majesty attends on every front.”Footnote 70 Diego de Chaves similarly asserted, “the legitimate reason and cause for giving the [bula de la cruzada] is the honor of God and the common good of the church.”Footnote 71

Citing Thomas, Soto, and others for support, the Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela claimed the granting of a cruzada needed to be rooted in the “public good” and considered this satisfied insofar as “the indulgence [is] conceded to the faithful who help in the war . . . against the infidels because such is the might of the Turks.”Footnote 72 That is, the challenge presented by the Turk was such that it demanded a martial response. Bishop Gregorio Antonio Gallo de Andrade developed this line of thought further, asserting that failure to grant the cruzada would result in “great danger to the public cause” of the church, since no “other human remedy” existed to withstand the “power of the infidels and heretics . . . except war and force of arms waged by the hand of his majesty.”Footnote 73 With all other avenues of recourse exhausted, a papal crusade led by the Spanish monarch became the only means left to protect Christendom from the ravages of her enemies.Footnote 74

Archbishop Pedro Guerrero, whose parecer was extremely critical of abuses and emphasized the damage being caused to Spanish devotion by the cruzada, nevertheless used similar language. He suggested that too many graces and privileges had accrued to the crusade bull and that they should be restricted in number and quality. The consequence, he believed, would not be a reduction in the number of people taking the bull, but an improvement in its reputation. This would also mean that rather than revoking old bulls to sell new ones, the pope could concede new graces when doing so converged with the “public or common cause.”Footnote 75

Even the Franciscan Páez, recently appointed to the Scotist Chair at the University of Alcalá, used natural law language.Footnote 76 Thus, he argued that the provisions of the bull of crusade were contradictory neither to “the laws of the council, nor to divine or natural law.”Footnote 77 If Páez's appropriation of this language came through Vitoria (either interacting with him personally, reading his works, or a general awareness of his theological trajectory), then it simply serves to reinforce the extent of his influence. If, however, it derives distinctly from the Franciscan's own engagement with natural law as developed by the masters of his own order, this would suggest that in mid-sixteenth-century Spain multiple schools of thought found it useful to ground crusade ideology in natural law language.Footnote 78

V. Conclusions

Yet natural law arguments based on the “common good” were ultimately an unstable foundation for crusade, just as arguments based upon prophecy had proven for mid-sixteenth century Spanish theorists. Practically, Vitoria had pronounced warfare against Muslims justified only in the event that they threatened an individual Christian republic or the respublica christiana as a whole.Footnote 79 Like the claims to Spanish exclusivity offered by the opiners, this was not a matter of providential appointment or prophetic revelation of the divine will, but the outworking of universally applicable natural law. The claim that “God wills it”—Deus lo vult, the cry of crusaders—could not have the same force for those who accepted Vitoria's fundamental assumptions as it had for those living in a previous era. The voluntarism of late the medieval nominalist tradition, which emphasized God's freedom to act as He chose, was eclipsed by thomistic realism, which asserted that God's will was bound by His moral character as revealed in natural law.

This hardly represented a full-scale dismissal of the crusading past. Indeed, in the wake of continued Ottoman advances, especially the fall of Cyprus in 1570–1571 to the Turks, the pope was forced to face facts. With the Turk massing for another naval advance, Pius gave way to the logic of the opiners’ arguments and granted Philip a robust and lucrative cruzada, which his heirs would hold onto in one form or another until the reforms surrounding Vatican II in the 1960s. Under the command of the king's half-brother don Juan of Austria, a coalition of Christian forces proved victorious over the Ottoman fleet off the coast of Greece near Lepanto in the autumn of 1571, halting the advance. Even prophecies and millenarian hopes were not completely a thing of the past. In the wake of Lepanto, for instance, another wave of poets and prophets remembered that the kings of Spain would be the ones to defeat the anti-Christian enemies of the faith and reconquer Jerusalem.Footnote 80 These ideas were carried over into the literature of the Spanish Golden Age in the work of Torquato Tasso, Miguel de Cervantes, Juan de la Cueva, and Lope de Vega.Footnote 81 Even in the seventeenth century, royal births could be greeted with similar prophetic utterances.Footnote 82 Yet, if early modern theorists hardly disavowed the crusading tradition, many would come to ground their thinking about just war in ways that accounted for the shifting of theological trends.

Trent had asserted the authority of scripture and tradition as the loci of Christian doctrine and practice, and with the publication of the influential De locis theologicis by the Dominican Melchior Cano (yet another student of Vitoria) at Salamanca in 1562, prophecy was eliminated as one of the “dwelling places of theological evidence.”Footnote 83 By the early seventeenth century literary trends too had shifted, away from attempts to incite a Spanish reconquest of Jerusalem toward the remembrance of past glories.Footnote 84 These trends correspond to the abandonment of millenarian exegesis by Roman Catholic biblical scholars around 1600, at least partially in order to distance themselves from those Protestant exegetes who viewed the Reformation as part of the unfolding of salvation history.Footnote 85

Just war thinking was in transition too. While the opiners used Vitoria's arguments to support the crusade, in later years these same intellectual strains in the hands of Balthasar de Ayala (1548–1584) and Protestant theorists such as Alberico Gentili (1552–1608) and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) provided the foundation for international law. Ayala, a layman of Spanish descent but raised in the Netherlands, served as a civilian auditor general during the Dutch revolt and became an influential theorist for the Spanish cause. His De jure officiis et disciplina militari (1582) followed Vitoria and his disciples by arguing, “War may not be declared against infidels merely because they are infidels, not even on the authority of the emperor or the Pope.”Footnote 86 Ayala allowed that a just war might be fought against those who “by their blasphemies and vicious arguments impeded the Christian faith and [hindered] the free preaching of the evangelical law,” and that the pope's authority could render a conflict just if it was necessary for the “peace and usefulness [quietatem et utilitatem] of the Christian commonwealth.”Footnote 87 But the confessional conflicts of the Thirty Years' War and the dawning reality of permanent religious division along national lines within a formerly united respublica christiana further undermined the possibility of papal calls for holy warfare.

Vitoria, the opiners, even Ayala, lived in a world where the dream of a single international Christian republic still existed. Although not viable over the long term, rhetorical justifications grounded in that idea proved attractive to the men who responded to Philip's questions in May 1567, and this suggests an important conclusion about the adaptability of crusade ideology even in the early modern era. The opiners wrote in period of inchoateness, and for them, if not for all of their contemporaries, certain traditional modes of legitimizing crusades had fallen into disrepute—prophecy and millennial expectations. Others, for the time being, remained viable—arguments based on just war and natural law, the need to defend Christendom, the validity of indulgences, the tradition of crusade, and even the role of the Spanish monarch as a chief actor in the defense of the faith.

Historians have been quick to describe the challenge of Protestantism, the co-opting of crusading by developing nation-states, and the growth of international law as factors that brought about the demise of crusading. And over the long term, they did contribute to it. Well into the sixteenth century, however, this was far from the whole story. In Spain at least, theologians succeeded in reconfiguring the theoretical foundations of crusading to account for modern developments. They even used many of the challenges advanced by Protestant detractors to shore up Spanish claims to the bula de la cruzada. And their arguments were not without effect, for Philip gained his cruzada in time for Lepanto, and his successors held onto it far into the twentieth century.

References

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24 It is unclear whose idea it was to solicit the pareceres. But they were solicited in the name of the king and the responses were addressed to Philip. Consequently, we will simply assume that the king's will lay behind the request, even if he was not the one to propose the stratagem or to draft the letter.

25 AGSC, leg. 20, docs. 47–8, 50–2, 93, 95, 97–101. Four of the pareceres have been printed in modern editions. For Guerrero, Covarrubias, and Delgado, see Cereceda, Feliciano, “Un episodo de la historia eclesiástica española: La concesión de la cruzada el año 1567,” Miscelánea Comillas 4 (1946): 109–48Google Scholar. For Azpilcueta's, see Gaztambide, José Goñi, “Un dictamen inédito del Dr. Navarro sobre Cruzada,” Hispania 23 (1946): 242–66Google Scholar.

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27 “las neçesidades de los Reyes de españa eran y son segun se dize tan grandes y avian gastado tanto de sus patrimonios en serviçio de la yglesia en defender las provinçias y cobrar otras de nuebo . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 101 (Gaspar de Zúñiga y Avellaneda), fol. 527r.

28 “Tengo por cosa digna de su sant[ida]d conçeder la cruzada como en los t[iem]pos passados, assi por la instancia de infieles como hemos dicho como por la pobreza del rey y reyno tan xpiano . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 97 (Juan de Salinas), fol. 507v.

29 “la causa principal porque se concede la dicha indulgencia es la suma grande de dineros q[ue] es necessaria para guerra tan pia y grande . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 93, fol. 482v.

30 “esto no se puede hazer sin gran sumo de din[er]o . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 47 (Diego de Chaves), fol. 291v. To be sure, the bull of crusade would also motivate the people not only to give money but also to engage in other pious acts such as prayer and fasting that would likewise contribute to victory, but generally financial concerns took center stage. See Cordoba, 491r.

31 Worthy of brief mention but generally of less importance among the financial rationale was the need to protect trade. Juan de Salinas argued that Barbary corsairs and Ottoman pirates had made the seas unsafe for Christian merchants; Mediterranean commerce was a necessary part of early modern life and deserved to be defended. See AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 97, fol. 505v. Salinas' argument may have been drawn from Francisco de Vitoria's conclusion that international trade was a law of nature. See Scott, James Brown, The Spanish Origins of International Law (Union, N.J.: The Lawbook Exchange, 2000), 144Google Scholar.

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37 AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 51, fol. 309r.

38 “supuesto que tantos summos pontificos con maduro co[n]sejo y larga deliveraçion tantos t[iem]pos atras han conçedido esta cruzada . . . parar aora su s[antida]d en ella havi[en]do m[a]yor causa para dalla que tuvieron sus predeçesores no paresçe se podria hazer sin mucho escandalo . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 47, fols. 292v–293r.

39 “sea de dar occasion de scandalo a los buenos y catholicos . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 95 (Antonio de Córdoba), fol. 495r.

40 “que en los tiempos y cruzadas pasadas el papa o la yglesia avian usado de algunas fraudes o avian hecho mal y errado en conceder las tales bullas indulgencias y facultade . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 95 (Antonio de Córdoba), fol. 495r.

41 See AGSC, leg. 20, doc.101 (Gaspar de Zúñiga y Avellaneda), fol. 535r and doc. 97 (Juan de Salinas), fol. 506r.

42 “solo el rey lo puede hazer . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 97, fol. 505v. See also doc. 99 (Mancio de Corpus Christi), fol. 515r, which makes a similar argument.

43 “solo el la puede servir en estos desdichados t[iem]pos . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 97, fol. 507v.

44 “cuya defensa en estos tiempos por la mayor parte o casi de todo pende de los catholicos Reyes de españa: pues ellos solos vemos que tienen guerras ordinarias contra los infieles . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 95, fol. 495v.

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57 Letter of Juan de Zúñiga to Philip II, Rome, 9 March 1568; AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 55, fol. 327r. On the editing of the responses, see Goñi Gaztambide, Historia de la Bula, 572. The following authors were given to Pius; the remainder were withheld: Diego de Chaves, Francisco Delgado López, Fernando Páez, Diego de Covarrubias y Levia, Antonio de Córdoba, and Juan de Salinas. For the translated pareceres (but missing Antonio de Córdoba's), see Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat., codex 7388, fols. 21–48.

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59 McGinn, Bernard, “The Abbot and the Doctors: Scholastic Reactions to the Radical Eschatology of Joachim of Fiore,” Church History 40 (1971): 30–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Examples of prophecies being used to place crusading endeavors within the story of salvation history are legion. See, for example, Whalen, Brett Edward, Dominion of God: Christendom and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009), 149–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Housley, “The Eschatological Imperative.”

61 On this issue, Vitoria took the side of his tireless confrere Bartolomé de Las Casas, who labored in support of the Indian cause into his nineties. But where Las Casas had based his argument fundamentally within the medieval canon law tradition, Vitoria operated as a theologian. Kenneth J. Pennington, Jr. argues that before Vitoria, the theological tradition had been divided over the justness of the dominium of infidels; it was his influence that resolved the question for the theologians. See Pennington, , “Bartolome de Las Casas and the Tradition of Medieval Law,” Church History 39 (1970), 156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 297; and Grewe, Wilhelm Georg, The Epochs of International Law, rev. and trans., Byers, Michael (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 189–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 de Vitoria, Francisco, “On the American Indians,” in Political Writings, ed. and trans., Pagden, Anthony and Lawrence, Jeremy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 276Google Scholar. “Dicunt enim nescio qui quod Dominus in suo peculiari iudicio condemnavit istos barbaros omnes ad perditionem propter abominationes suas et tradidit in manus Hispanorum . . . .” Vitoria, , De indis et de iure belli relectiones, ed. Nys, Ernest (Washington, D.C.: The Carnegie Institute, 1917), 254Google Scholar.

64 Vitoria, “On the American Indians,” in Political Writings, 276–77. “Sed de hoc nolo multum disputare, quia periculose crederetur alicui prophetiam adserenti contra communem legem et contra regulas Scripturae, nisi miraculis confirmaretur doctrina sua, quae tamen nulla proferuntur ab huiusmodi prophetis. . . . Unde ubi fides aut auctoritas aut providentia ostendit quid agendum sit, non est reurrendum ab dona.” Vitoria, De indis et de iure belli relectiones, 254–55.

Presumably, the loophole of miraculous substantiation of the divine will would have allowed Vitoria and his disciples to accept as legitimate many of the medieval crusades, which frequently were accompanied by miracles. See Hamilton, Bernard, “God Wills It: Signs of Divine Approval in the Crusade Movement,” in Cooper, Kate and Gregory, Jeremy, eds., Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 88–98Google Scholar.

65 Francisco de Vitoria, “On the Law of War,” in Political Writings, 321. “Sed aliquando aliter obtineri securitas non potest, nisi tollendo omnes hostes, et hoc maxime videtur contra infideles, a quibus nunquam ullis condicionibus pax aequa sperari potest. Et ideo unicum remedium est tollere omnes, qui contra arma ferre possunt, modo iam fuerint in culpa.” Vitoria, De indis et de iure belli relectiones, 292. See Housely, Norman, Religious War in Europe, 1450–1536 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 15Google Scholar.

66 Francisco Delgado López: Flórez, Enrique, et al., España Sagrada: Teatro Geográfico-Histórico de la Iglesia de España, 51 vols. (Madrid: Antonio Marín, 1747–75), 41:162Google Scholar; Diego de Covarrubia y Levia: Ezquerra, Alfredo Alvar, La Economía en la España Moderna (Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 2006), 491–92Google Scholar; Pedro Guerrero de Logoño: Ocete, Antonio Marín, El arzobispo don Pedro Guerrero y la política conciliar española en el sigle XVI (Madrid: CSIC, 1970), 83Google Scholar; Mancio de Corpus Christi: Wieks, Jared, “Doctrine and Theology,” in Catholicism in Early Modern Europe, ed. O'Malley, John (St Louis, Mo.: Center for Reformation Research, 1988), 235Google Scholar; Gaspar de Zúñiga y Avellaneda: de Heredia, Vincente Beltran, Domingo de Soto (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 1960), 71Google Scholar; Gregorio Antonio Gallo de Andrade: de Colmenares, Diego, Historia de la insigne ciudad de Segovia y conpendio de las historias de Castilla (Segovia: Diego Diez, 1637), 573Google Scholar.

67 de Carlos Morales, Carlos Javier, “La participación en el gobierno a través de la conciencia regia: Fray Diego de Cháves, O.P., confesor de Felipe II,” in I religiosi a corte: teologia, politica e diplomazia in antico regime, ed. Rurale, Flavio (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1998), 133Google Scholar.

68 Lupher, David A., Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Campos, Rafael Torres, Carácter de la conquista y colonización de las islas Canarias: Discursos léidos ante la Real academia de la historia en la recepción pública de don Rafael Torres Campos el día 22 de diciembre de 1901 (Madrid: Depósito de la Guerra: 1901), 55Google Scholar.

70 “el bien publico esta claro pues no çesan las invasiones y offensas q[ue] los infieles cada dia con mayor agonia y fuerças hazen a la christiandad y procuran hazer por donde esta llano ser cada dia necessario el nuevo socorro . . . por el bien comun de toda la Republica xpi[sti]ana a cuya defension su mag[esta]d assiste por todas las partes.” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 52 (Diego de Covarrubias y Levia), fol. 317r.

71 “la rrazon y causa legitima para dar la indulgençia es la honrra de dios y bien comun de la ygl[es]ia . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 47, fol. 291r. The phrases “bien común,” “bien público,” “causa común,” and “causa pública” are used frequently in the responses; their meaning appears to be largely interchangeable.

72 “la causa comun sufficientissima es la que ha avido para que se conçeda indulgençia a los fieles que ayudaren contra la guerra. . . contra los infieles por ser tanta la pujança de los Turcos . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc, 101 (Gaspar de Zúñiga y Avellaneda), fols. 528r-v.

73 “ni para resistir a los [infieles] ni castigar y confundir a los [herejes] ay otro remedio humano sino la guerra y fuerça de armas hecha por mano de su mag[esta]d. . . . si [el Papa] le quita o dilata este socorro [de la cruzada] dara lugar a diverso juizios todas en gran daño de la causa publica” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 100, fol. 523v.

74 Compare with Vitoria's description of the sufficient grounds for waging war. Political Writings, 304.

75 “se estimarian en mas y podria cesar la revocaçion porq[ue] quedaria lugar para conceder nuevas gra[cia]s quando concurriesa la causa publica o comun . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 98, fol. 509v.

76 This is not to suggest that the Franciscan tradition had failed to engage the notion of natural law before the sixteenth century. Both Duns Scotus and William of Ockham made important contributions to the debate in the later Middle Ages, but in sixteenth-century Spain the parameters of debates on the topic were typically conditioned by Vitorian reinvigoration of Thomistic thought. For a late medieval Franciscan approach to natural law, see Offler, H. S., “Three Modes of Natural Law in Ockham. A Revision of the Text,” Franciscan Studies 23 (1977): 207–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 “las leyes del conçilio ni al derech natural y divino . . . .” AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 51, fol. 312r. For additional uses of terms and arguments that resonate with natural law concepts, see his discussion of the bula de composición (a version of the bula de la cruzada that could be used to legitimize ill-gotten gains) in fols. 310r-v.

78 For use of similar language by Páez's confrere, Antonio de Córdoba, OFM, see AGSC, leg. 20, doc. 95, fol. 318v and 319r.

79 Vitoria even seems to deny that going to war against unbelievers who “put the Crucifix to ridicule, or in any way abused or shamed Christian things, for instance by making mockery of the sacraments of the Church or things of this kind” was illegitimate. Political Writings, 265–66.

80 Achille Olivieri, “Il significato escatologico di Lepanto nella storia religiosa del Mediterraneo del Cinquecento,” 257–77; and Calero, Bartolomé Pozuelo, “El Licenciado Pacheco y Lepanto: un poema latino de vaiticinios y delirios imperiales,” Excerpta philologica 4–5 (1994–5): 335–69Google Scholar.

81 García Martín, “La Jerusalén Libertada,” 45–52.

82 de Cañete, Cristóbal López, Compendio de los pronósticos y baticinios antiguos y modernos que publicavan la declinacion general de la secta de Mohama, y libertad de Hierusalem y Palestina (Madrid: Francisco Heglan, 1630)Google Scholar. See also Magnier, Grace, Pedro de Valencia and the Catholic Apologists of the Expulsion of the Moriscos (Leiden: Brill. 2010), 122–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Hvidt, Niels Chrisian, Christian Prophecy: The Post-Biblical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 197–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 García Martín, “La Jerusalén Libertada,” 51.

85 McGinn, “Wrestling with the Millennium,” 166. Hvidt arrives at a similar conclusion regarding the downgrading of the place of prophecy within Roman Catholic theology. See Christian Prophecy, 200–201.

86 “bellum adversum infideles, ex eo quod solum infideles sunt, ne quidam auctoritate impiratoris, vel summi Pontifitis, indici potest . . ..” De jure et officiis bellicis et disciplina militari libri III (Douai: Officina Ioannis Bogardi, 1582), 20rGoogle Scholar.

87 “Contenditur vero iuto bello cum infidelibus, ex causis, ex quibus cum aliis quibuscunque bellum gerere licet tum etiam ex eo quod forte fidem Christianam blasphemiis, pravisque persuasionibus impediant, atque item legis evangelicae liberam predicationem, qui habent ius predicandi evangelii per universum orbem.” Ayala, De jure et officiis bellicis, 20v–21r.