16th-Century Doctrines of Just War & the Origins of the Spanish Empire

Kluge Fellow Andrew Devereux examined the legal and moral questions of empire on the threshold of the early modern era by casting light on Spain’s expansionary ventures in the Mediterranean basin in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. His talk focused on Spain’s Mediterranean expansion, particularly on Spanish designs on the Holy Land and the ways in which the acquisition of the title to the defunct crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem served as the basis for legal arguments justifying war and conquest in a range of lands inhabited by non-Christian peoples.

Speaker Biography: Andrew Devereux is assistant professor of history at Loyola Marymount University. He is a historian of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. Devereux earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, where his dissertation examined Spanish imperial ideologies in the context of the Mediterranean world.

For transcript and more information, visit https://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7409