Salamanca and the Formation of the Mexican Inquisition in the Sixteenth Century

This paper examines the deep ideological connections between Salamanca, Spain and the Mexican Inquisition in the sixteenth century. Salamanca, both in its major friaries—the Dominican San Esteban and the Franciscan San Francisco—and in its university exerted a profound influence on the early intellectual development of Mexico. The constitutions of the University of Mexico, founded in 1553 in large part by a man trained by the leading light of the University of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria, were based explicitly on those of the University of Salamanca. The Inquisition of Mexico, both in its early form as apostolic and diocesan inquisitions in the 1550s and 1560s as well as in its mature administrative formation in 1571 was dominated by theologians and jurists trained at San Esteban, San Francisco and the University of Salamanca. Likewise the particular brand of theology promoted in Salamanca—rigorist, anti-Jesuit, conservative and Dominican—came to dominate the collective mentality and ideology of the early decades of Inquisitional activity in Mexico. The result was an Inquisition steeped in distrust of the non-Latinized laity, hatred of Jesuit visions of free will, and staunchly supportive of counter-reformation trends zeroing in on Erasmianism and humanism. This paper discusses this formation and concludes with some comments on how, in the seventeenth century, the dominance of the Salamanca ideology would be challenged by customary concerns and the rising influence of the Jesuits in Mexico.