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Journal of World History 8.2 (1997) 329-331



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Imagining the World: Mythical Belief versus Reality in Global Encounters. By O.R.Dathorne. Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 1994. Pp. x + 241. $49.95 (cloth).
The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century. By James Muldoon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 239. $32.95 (cloth).

Both of these books offer contributions to well-established genres of scholarly literature and debate pertaining to the European assimilation of the discovery and conquest of the Americas during the early modern period. James Muldoon's study, The Americas in the Spanish World Order, examines the contributions of Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575-1654) to the corpus of writings produced by Spanish jurists and theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who sought to defend or challenge their government's operations in the New World. O.R.Dathorne's Imagining the World speaks to the problem of Europe's "invention" of the Americas out of its complex inheritance of cosmological, geographical, historical, and mythical texts and images.

The Americas in the Spanish World Order is the latest in a series of volumes in which Muldoon intends to investigate historically significant continuities between medieval and modern moral and legal justifications for the invasion and conquest of one polity by another. These investigations in turn beg larger questions regarding the relationship of politics and morality in European theory and practice. Muldoon's im-portant earlier work, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250-1350, located the beginnings of this history in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The increasing incidence of contacts between Christians and non-Christians resulting from pilgrimage and from the Crusades produced a cluster of issues for canon lawyers to consider. Paramount among these was establishing the moral and political criteria according to which a "just war" could legitimately be waged. Concurrently, the plenitude of papal power in temporal as well as spiritual matters expanded and consolidated, reaching its apogee in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198-1216). The legal and theological ground was laid for the papacy to justify invasion and conquest and to adjudicate conflicts arising from the encounter of Christian and non-Christian peoples. So, for example, in the course of the fifteenth century a series of popes beginning with Nicholas V issued bulls giving first Portugal and then the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, sovereignty over newly discovered lands in [End Page 329] Africa and the Americas. When disputes arose in the last decade of the century, it was Pope Alexander VI who arbitrated. Exercising the plenitude of papal power, he issued four bulls in 1493, including two versions of Inter caetera. These bulls then led to direct negotiations between Spain and Portugal.

The Americas in the Spanish World Order takes this story into the seventeenth century through a close analysis of a section of the first volume of Solórzano's De indiarum jure. De justa indiarum occidentalium inquisitione, acquisitione, et retentione, published in 1629. Muldoon selects Solórzano not because he is an original thinker but rather be-cause he represents a significant and perhaps not adequately recognized position in seventeenth-century European debates regarding the justification for Spanish colonization of the Americas. Solórzano was a "scholar-bureaucrat" (p. 8) who had established a reputation as a judge in Peru and who served on the Council of the Indies. His writings circulated in Europe and the Americas well into the nineteenth century.

Muldoon clearly demonstrates that Solórzano took the position that only a papal grant legitimized Spain's (or any other sovereignty's) possession of territories in the New World. Solórzano's position was deeply traditional, rooted in the conviction of the enduring validity and ultimate authority of the plenitude of papal power in the arbitration of relations between Christians and infidels. Muldoon indicates some of the ways in which Sol&oacute...

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