La toma de conciencia sobre la esclavitud en la Escuela de Salamanca

Abstract

The attitude towards slavery of a group of scholastics considered members or followers of the so-called School of Salamanca, can be measured as a process of gradual awareness on the concept of natural slavery as well as the causes that justified slavery itself. Indians and blacks were the first victims of the modern application of the concept and, over time, benefited from its intellectual dismantling, leaving it without a recognizable reference in reality. It would take longer to discover the bad practices that protected legal slavery, es-pecially in its application to Africans, and would do it by tortuous paths, not without set-backs. The reflection on its permanent deception and continued denunciation also ended, towards the decade of 1570, with the recourse to ignorance, to which so many buyers resorted. The abolitionist proposals began a century later and their success was delayed several more, but they were based on the seed planted in the sixteenth century.