New Worlds and Th eir Challenges 113Dominican friar and professor of theology at the University of Salamanca.
Palacios Rubios was a distinguished lawyer and member of the Council of
Castile.
Paz set out this thesis in an exposition entitled De Domino Regum His-
paniae super Indios (On the Dominion of the Spanish King over the Indies).
Th is was noteworthy in relying on the papal grants as the sole basis of legal
title of the Spanish monarchs. Th e v iews of Pa lacios Rubios were expounded
in a work entitled De Insulis Oceanus (On the Islands of the Ocean Sea). He
contended that, even granting the position of Innocent IV that pagan princes
possessed lawful sovereignty, that sovereignty could be revoked from them
by the pope and transferred to other rulers (i.e., the Spanish crown). Nei-
ther of these works, however, was published at the time.
Palacios Rubios did not shrink from the full logical consequences of his
thesis. It meant that the Spanish crown had sovereignty over the New World
territories even prior to the conquests on the ground. Th e task of the Span-
ish in the New World was therefore to inform the natives that they now had
a new sovereign in the hope that they would quietly accept the new state of
aff airs. If they proved uncooperative on this point, then they could be law-
fully subdued by force— as rebels against their lawful sovereign, not as sub-
jects of an in de pen dent foreign prince.
To facilitate this pro cess of taking control of territories already granted,
Palacios Rubios outlined a procedure that became known as the re-
querimiento. It appears to have been modeled on prior Islamic practices,
which the Spanish became aware of during their reconquista of the Iberian
peninsula. In essence, the “requirement” was a summons or ultimatum
that was read out to the population of the area that the Spanish were intend-
ing to conquer. It informed the people that the Spanish were now their law-
ful sovereigns and called upon them to accept this state of aff airs. As such, it
has been derided by one modern historian as “surely the crassest example of
legalism in modern Eu ro pe an history” and by another, scarcely more gently,
as “a strange blend of ritual, cynicism, legal fi ction, and perverse idealism.”
Th e text of the requerimiento began with a (necessarily brief ) recitation of
the history of the world. Th is included the key information that the pope
had been made “lord and superior to all the men in the world” by God and
that he had allocated the lands of the Indians to the monarchs of Castile.
Th e hearers were invited to inspect the documents proving this, if they so