Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

News of the sufferings inflicted on the Indians filled him with a particular anger. ‘Do you doubt that your king is in hell?’21 he demanded of one Spanish visitor to Rome. Here, in his shock that a Christian ruler should think to justify conquest and savagery in the name of the crucified Christ, was the expression of a scholarly tradition that reached all the way back to Alcuin. Cajetan, in his efforts to provide the Indians with a legal recourse against their oppressors, never imagined that he was breaking new ground. The discovery of continents and peoples unimagined by Aquinas did not render the great Dominican any the less qualified to serve as a guide as to how they should be treated. The teachings of the Church were universal in their reach. That the kingdoms of the Indians were legitimate states; that Christianity should be imposed, not by force, but solely by means of persuasion; that neither kings, nor emperors, nor the Church itself had any right to ordain their conquest: here, in Cajetan’s opinion, were the principles fit to govern a globalised age.