ABSTRACT
The most important and foundational theoretical treatises written in the sixteenth-century debate on the subject of the rights of conquest originated in 1537, when Francisco de Vitoria drafted a series of lectures that he later delivered at the University of Salamanca, particularly "De Indis" and "De Jure Belli". The implications of the debate for European rhetorical and literary practices in the representation of the conquest of America, as well as for the development of early modern prose narrative more generally, were significant. The neo-Thomist understanding of natural law forms the backdrop for Vitoria's discussion of the rights of conquest. Thus, in "De Indis," he first considers the arguments, made by apologists of the conquest, that the American Indians had no right to dominium because they were "barbarians." The concept of "natural slavery," Vitoria explains, was founded on the Politics, in which Aristotle had written that "the lower sort of humanity are by nature slaves.
