The two editors were able to work together on this book on the conducive neutral ground of Oxford and in the company of Peter Russell, to whom the book is gratefully dedicated in recognition of this and many other debts incurred by both of us over many years.

We share responsibility for the finished work, but the initial division of labour was as follows: the Introduction and choice of texts were Anthony Pagden's, who also compiled the table of ‘Principal events in Vitoria's life’ and ‘Bibliographical note’; the editing and translation of the texts were the work of Jeremy Lawrance, who also contributed the ‘Critical note on texts and translation’, the short critical introductions to each text, the footnote commentary, and the ‘Biographical notes’, glossary, list of references, and index at the end of the book. The text was subsequently revised by both editors. In particular, Anthony Pagden made numerous suggestions and corrections to the translation and notes.

Anthony Pagden would like to thank Quentin Skinner and Raymond Geuss for their comments on an earlier draft of the Introduction. He would also like to thank Ms Kate Eliot of Princeton University for allowing him to see an unpublished paper on Vitoria's conciliarism, to which his own observations on the subject are greatly indebted.

Some years ago, the late Ewart Lewis observed that it was likely to be a long time before the “average professor of political theory will turn to his well-underlined copy of Nicholas of Cusa's De concordantia catholica with the same facility with which he turned to Aristotle's Politics.” This first complete translation of the Concordantia into English is an effort to make this major work of political and eccelesiological theory available to contemporary scholars. Before its publication the only English translation was a sometimes inaccurate excerpt containing the sections dealing with the theory of consent and Nicholas' proposals for a system of representative councils in the medieval empire. The lack of a definitive Latin text, the length of the work, and the considerable linguistic problems arising from Cusanus' awkward style and defective knowledge of Latin have long deterred scholars from undertaking the formidable task of translation.

The problem of establishing the Latin text has been resolved, thanks to the work of dedicated German scholars. In 1928, Professor Gerhard Kallen agreed to prepare a critical Latin edition under the auspices of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Books I and II were published in 1939 but the publication of Book III was delayed by World War II and it only appeared in 1959.

This extract from Vitoria's lectiones of 1534 – 5 on ST II-II. 10 ‘On unbelief in general’ shows the development of Vitoria's political ideas in connexion with the problem of evangelization in the two years leading up to the composition of the relections on the ‘barbarians’. His lectures on this quaestio make it clear that Vitoria was led to consider the topic as much by the problem of the moriscos and conversos (Moslem and Jewish converts in Spain) as by the American conquests. On the American Indians began as a re-reading of Article 12 ‘Whether it is lawful to baptize the children of non-Christians against the wishes of their parents’. The lectio translated here is on the more interesting Article 8. For convenience it has been divided into five sections (§§).

Reportata of the 1534–5 course survive in a number of MSS. As if to prove the connexion with the Indian question, the anonymous Madrid Biblioteca de Palacio MS from which the following extract is taken includes, between Vitoria's lectures on II-II. 10. 8 and 9 (fols. 65v–75v), a copy of a relection On the Caribbean Indians (De insulanis) by Father Domingo de las Cuevas, OP, Minor Professor of Thomist Theology in the university of Alcalá. In it, Cuevas quotes Vitoria's ideas on the ‘affair of the Indies’ as ammunition against a relection De Indis of another Alcalá professor, Father Domingo de Santa Cruz, OP.

These lectures On Law were delivered in the academic session of 1533–4 as part of Vitoria's day-to-day teaching of Aquinas' Summa, which he was then working through for the third time in his career (the full cycle took roughly seven years). It was to be the last time he would cover ST I-II; a fourth cycle, begun in 1539, had to be abandoned to substitutes by Christmas 1540 because of illness.

The extracts translated here consist of lectiones 121 – 9 and 136 – 7 (from the session's total of 154 lectures). The Spanish academic year began on the Monday after St Luke's Day, 15 October; these lectiones would thus have been delivered around Wliitsuntide of 1534, roughly at the beginning of our summer term. Officially, Vitoria should have been covering the university's set text for theology, Lombard's Sentences, but he preferred Aquinas. This was not the only liberty Vitoria took; the copyist of our MS notes that he omitted the ‘easy’ questions 25–49 altogether, ‘so as to get through the text by the end of term’ (‘ut possemus hoc anno finem imponere toti 1e 2e, fol. 29v). In the lectures translated below Vitoria omits some of Aquinas' articles, or dismisses them with a phrase.

The lectiones survive only in students' reportata. The ones translated here are taken from the anonymous Vatican MS Ottob. 1000.

The second relection on the power of the Church was delivered in early 1533. P's version is copied by the same hand as I On the Power of the Church (probably that of Fray Andrés de Burgos). Besides being more accurate than the printed texts, Andrés' copy preserves Vitoria's original division into six questions and twenty-seven propositiones.

RELECTION II ON THE POWER OF THE CHURCH OF THE VERY REVEREND MASTER FR. FRANCISCO DE VITORIA, DELIVERED IN SALAMANCA, A. D. 1533

In the other lecture which I gave on this topic last year, I dealt with part of the subject of ecclesiastical power; namely, by what law and when it was set up, the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical power, and the comparisons between the two. Consequently, on this occasion I shall discuss the subjects in whom this kind of power is vested, and other weightier theological questions concerning power.

[Question 1, Single article: Whether the power of the Church belongs to the Church as a whole]

§1 First of all, therefore, we may put the question whether the power of the Church per se is vested in the Church as a whole? That is to say, in the universal Church as distinct from its individual members, by analogy with the way in which civil power is immediately present in the whole commonwealth, as both theologians and philosophers correctly concede. It may seem that it is:

1. By the analogy with secular power, which is vested in the whole commonwealth though it is delegated to the magistracies and other powers within that commonwealth.

PREFACE

268. If anyone should care to trace out from the beginning the foundations that are both necessary and useful for our purpose, he should look to the principles on which they are based – those of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and all the other philosophers who have written about well-ordered political, economic, and monarchic regimes. Natural laws precede all human considerations and provide the principles for them all. First, nature intends every kind of animal to preserve its physical existence and its life, to avoid what would be harmful and to secure what is necessary to it, as Cicero concludes in the first book, third [fourth] chapter of De officiis. For the first requirement of essence is that it exist. Therefore for any essence to exist, it possesses inborn faculties designed for this purpose – instinct, appetite, and reason. Hence it happens in different ways in nature that various means are implanted by natural instinct for the purpose of existence and self preservation. On this basis Aristotle concludes in the last chapter of the seventh book of the Politics that every art and discipline exists to supply what nature lacks.

269. But from the beginning men have been endowed with reason which distinguishes them from animals. They know because of the exercise of their reason that association and sharing are most useful – indeed necessary for their self-preservation and to achieve the purpose of human existence.

The relection On Dietary Laws, or Self-Restraint, was supposed to be delivered in 1537. Vitoria was ill in the early months of that year, and did not give his ordinary lectures on the second half of ST II-II. But his substitute, Andrés de Vega, knew the master was working on the knotty problem raised by Aquinas' treatment of cannibalism, a topic on which Vitoria had already delivered an unorthodox opinion in his first lecture cycle on the passage. The finished relection was finally delivered in early 1538; its proper title, De usu ciborum, is preserved only in MS P (fol. 96), which further announces that it is a re-reading of ST II-II. 141 ‘On Self-Restraint’. Only the subtitle On Self-Restraint was preserved in later witnesses – though if we are surprised to find cannibalism and human sacrifice the chief subjects of a piece headed ‘Temperance’, it may do to recall that Montaigne's discussion of Aztec sacrifices occurs in an essay ‘On Moderation’, immediately followed by the famous ‘Of the Cannibals’ (Essais I. 29, 30).

Vitoria's divisio promises two parts, the first of nine articles on gluttony and cannibalism, and the second of three articles on sexual incontinence. However, a few lines after the point where the ‘affair of the Indies’ is introduced (Article 5), the text breaks off in both P and L. Andrés de Burgos, the copyist of De usu ciborum in P, noted in his colophon that part of this fifth article, and the whole of the promised second part on lechery, were missing ‘in the original’ (fol. 105v).