This was refined still further around 1530, by what came to be known as the ‘School of Salamanca’, a group of theologians that included Francisco Vitoria and Luis de Molina. They developed the view that if the Indians were not natural slaves then they were ‘nature’s children’, a less developed form of humanity. In his treatise De Indis, Vitoria argued that American Indians were a third species of animal between man and monkey, ‘created by God for the better service of man’.
