University of Salamanca

University of Salamanca at Salamanca, Spain; founded 1218 by Alfonso IX of León, reorganized 1254 by Alfonso X of Castile and León. It has faculties of philosophy, philology, geography and history, sciences, economic sciences, psychology, chemistry, biology, fine arts, law, medicine, and pharmacy. It also has schools of business, nursing, library science, social studies, and social work and an institute of educational sciences. There are university colleges at Avila and Zamora; the Polytechnic Institute of Zamora is affiliated.

Vitoria, Francisco de (1483–1546), Spanish Dominican. From 1526 he held the Prime Chair in Theology at the University of Salamanca. By substituting the Summa Theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas for Peter Lombard's Sentences as the theological textbook, he inaugurated a new school at Salamanca, which became the chief university in Europe for the study of Scholasticism in the 16th cent. He is now often seen as the ‘Father of International Law’. He discussed the morality of the conquest of the Indies and was critical of the Spanish methods of colonization in America. He also laid down the conditions of a just war and held that no war would be permissible if it brought serious evil to Christendom and the world at large.