Demokrates secundus-Zweiter Demokrates

Artículo

Resumen *

Three notes mark the intellectual profile of Sepúlveda: he is a very good translator of Aristotle, he is a chronicler of political and ecclesiastical facts, and above all, he is a theoretician of the legitimacy of war. He applied his theories about war to the concrete case of the inhabitants of the New World. Firstly he did it in the Democrates primus (1535), where he defends the compatibility of war with Christianity. In 1545 he took up the same subject in the Democrates secundus, which he presented in 1550-1 as a manuscript in the Junta de Valladolid, in opposition to the theses of Bartolomé de Las Casas. Because of the extremely conservative nature of the text, its publication was rejected and its circulation was banned in Spain. In a way, it was a "forbidden book" that had to wait until 1892, when it was published by the scholar Menendez Pelayo. Información suministrada por el agente en SIGEVA