The Colombian Quincentenary, whatever else it may have done, spawned—or at least highlighted (with more still to come)—a large number of historical works relating to Columbus himself, the broader process of exploration and conquest, the mutual perceptions of Europeans and New World indigenous peoples, and the ideological underpinnings of expanding European hegemony. Among the most useful and interesting of the last are new scholarly editions of notable primary documents of the period, including works by participants in the great sixteenth-century debates in Spain about the legal and moral status of the conquest of the Indies—debates with profound modem resonances.

Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) has been particularly well served in this regard. In addition to the work under review here there is, for example, a new edition in paperback of his anti-Sepulviad, In Defense of the Indians, translated by Martin E. Marty (1992); and now we have an excellent scholarly anthology of the political writings of Francisco de Vitoria (1486-1546), including his famous lecture-essays “On Dietary Laws, or Self-Restraint,” “On the American Indians,” and “On the Law of Just War.” Las Casas, Vitoria, and other writers of nearly half a millennium past have thereby added their voices, willingly or not, to the current loud and polyphonic discussions of the hemispheric environment, the status of Native American peoples, multiculturalism, and postmodernism.

It is more that a bit daunting to think about “reviewing,” in any normal sense, Fray Bartolomé s great politicotheological tract or Fray Francisco’s brilliantly crafted classroom lectures, since these texts themselves enjoy something like canonical status in the development of Western thought. We can say that Las Casas’ first book and Vitoria’s relectiones—both written by extremely well educated men of wide and cosmopolitan Catholic culture—stake out common critical ground by favoring the legitimacy of Spanish New World conquests. Indeed, Las Casas’ book, composed in Mexico in 1539, may even have influenced his fellow Dominican’s thinking on the issue of the conquest (though editor Helen Rand Parish, in her understandable zeal to exalt Las Casas, tends to oversell this point somewhat unconvincingly). The work—even in this stripped-down edition, replete with classical and Scholastic references—argues passionately that violent conversion of New World peoples was illegitimate under any circumstances. In so doing it lays out important principles of missiology for later pagan evangelization and foreshadows the ethnographical, historical, and theological outlines of Las Casas’ voluminous later writings.

For his part, by contrast, Vitoria came almost incidentally to the issue of the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest through his thinking and lecturing at the great University of Salamanca. (His works survive through the media of his students’ notes and unpublished versions in his own hand). There he contemplated the relationship among divine, natural, and human laws, and the wellsprings of monarchical authority. No Christian humanist—as his editor points out—but of a stem anti-Protestant, Thomist bent, Vitoria came to teach (as exemplified in “On the American Indians ”) that though they might be barbarians, the American Indians were privileged to claim the same rights under the ius gentium (law of nations) as any other human beings, and could neither be converted to Christianity by force nor conquered and deprived of their property and sovereignty.

So far as a nonclassicist can tell, these two new translations and scholarly editions are subtle and expert. Missing parts of The Only Way have been reconstructed from fragments and others of Las Casas’ works, and the text has been purged of the later, massive scholarly proofs and apparatus that the author himself added. Both texts are quite accessible to modern readers, even with their own formidable scholarly and editorial apparatus, though a pleasant archaism of style and language has been preserved. A dry whisper of Scholastic humor even rustles occasionally through Vitoria’s pages, as opposed to the relentlessly righteous and prophetic persona projected by Las Casas—though one cannot fail to be impressed by the Apostle’s passionate humanism. Parish’s 50-page biographical introduction to The Only Way provides a useful brief sketch of Las Casas’ life, situating the tract in the corpus of his work and public career. One might wish that her essay were less breathlessly adulatory, less freighted with jarring modem colloquialisms (a late version of the tract, we are told, was “recast … in a messed-up form” [p. 3]), and less resolutely in the Black Legend camp (Parish never once mentions, in her catalogue of the ills that devastated New World native populations, the effects of epidemic disease).

Anthony Pagden’s 15-page introduction to Vitoria’s writings, on the other hand, is characterized by the same dense but pellucid prose one has come to expect of him from his other scholarly writing. The essay economically elucidates the main elements of the Salamancan professor’s thought, situates him in the context of the debates of his age, and evaluates his contributions to early modem theories of law, state power, and the enterprise of the conquest itself. In the end, both texts are powerful statements of the limits of state power and the rights of conquest, and eloquent vindications of human rights in general and the rights of New World peoples in particular.