ABSTRACT
This chapter describes all the critiques of the just war which are reactions to the several crises that transformed European interstate relations in the early sixteenth century. Niccolo Machiavelli and Desiderius Erasmus were reacting, in opposite ways, to the new destructiveness of Renaissance warfare; Juan Gines de Sepulveda, to the discovery and conquest of the New World; the holy war preachers, to the Reformation and the wars of religion. The racist doctrines of Sepulveda were often repeated, in a modified form. Some claimed that natural slavery applied to wild forest Indians but not to civilized peoples like the Incas. The just war tradition survived all these attacks. It remained the central doctrine of European thought about interstate relations. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the western European elite achieved widespread agreement on principles of warfare and interstate relations. There emerged an early modern intellectual synthesis, comparable to the late medieval synthesis, whose influence lasted into the nineteenth century.
