Virtual Library of the Salamanca School

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INTRODUCTION:
VIRTUAL LIBRARY OF THE SALAMANCA SCHOOL AND LINKED OPEN DATA

Xavier Agenjo Bullón
Member, Government Archive, Library, and Archaeology Service
Director (on leave of absence) of the Menéndez Pelayo Library
Project Director of the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation

The Ignacio Larramendi Foundation presents what is perhaps its most ambitious undertaking to date and there is no better time than the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the founding by my friend and teacher Ignacio Larramendi of the Hernando Larramendi Foundation, which changed its name to its current name by unanimous decision of its Board of Patrons in 2005.

As often happens in the history of thought and ideas, the Salamanca School is not a formal construct. Nevertheless, critics have discerned certain common traits in a group of Spanish thinkers, nearly all of them men of the Church. With the possible exception of the Toledo School of Translators, the Salamanca School is probably Spain's – and, indeed, Spanish America's – greatest contribution to date to Western and world thought.

The complex nature of the relations between its members is one of the features of the Salamanca School; they often followed in each other's footsteps in holding university professorships or engaged in quarrels; other times they became embroiled in terrible disagreements and even legal disputes, coming either from the secular arm or from the Inquisition; sometimes they attacked each other, other times they came to each other's defence. The names of some of these authors appear on the approbations written for books by other authors or in the dedications which, together with the approbations, appeared at the beginning of early Spanish books. It is all extremely complicated.

On the other hand, the fount of thinking was quite fertile, and its influence was enormous from the very start, sometimes indisputably so. Nevertheless, explicit declarations by authors of the period who were influenced are few and far between and can be found only in passages in which an author has recourse to critical views, sometimes of a pamphleteering nature. For instance, Pascal's Lettres provinciales. But while Descartes and Leibnitz were directly influenced by these authors, the fact is that they either glossed this over or mentioned it only in passing. The former studied at a school run by the Jesuits, where the textbooks were written by authors of the Salamanca School, in particular books by Francisco Suárez, and where the author of Discours de la méthode said he had had an excellent education.

Leibnitz recognized his debt without according it any particular importance, though in time some of his most fertile ideas were clearly based not only on Ramon Llull but also on Sebastián Izquierdo, to mention an author much closer to him in time. The Catalonian philosopher Nicol traced the direct influence of Suárez in Locke and through Locke in the Constitution of the state of Pennsylvania and in the Declaration of Independence of the United States, and indeed in the U.S. Constitution as well. Francisco de Vitoria has long been considered the father of international law, and his huge influence on Grotius has been well documented, though it is obvious to anyone who has read Suárez.

Pascal has already been mentioned, but reference could likewise be made to Arnault, because his Port Royal Grammaire and his Logique, both, were clearly derived from Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, though it was Chomsky who first brought this to light in his Cartesian Linguistics.

More recently, following publication of Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung by Schumpeter, the great influence of the Salamanca School on the development of economic theory came to be generally acknowledged, and De monetae mutatione by Juan de Mariana is obviously a clear forerunner of the modern theory of money. It should not be surprising that Azpilcueta and Mercado should have undertaken meticulous studies of everything that was happening in the economic realm, of the immense impact produced by the discovery of America and by trade between the two continents and the subsequent globalization that followed the conquest of the Philippines

The contribution of the work of Francisco Hernández to natural history was decisive, and Linnaeus sent his manuscripts Löfling to study, called Hernández "the Copernicus of botany". It is not widely known that de Soto described the acceleration of falling bodies perfectly in mathematical terms in a work known to Galileo. Or that Zúñiga defended the Copernican system, which, now that the subject has come up, was included in the curriculum studied at the University of Salamanca when it was being censured in the Protestant, Calvinist, and Anglican countries.

It is not my intention to reopen the question of the challenge of science in Spain, a question long since settled. However, for obvious reasons I should mention Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, whose oeuvre is also featured on this website in the FHL Virtual Libraries, and Eloy Bullón, whose book On the Origins of Modern Philosophy addresses the Spanish forerunners of Bacon and Descartes and whose title is sufficiently explicit in itself.

Along these same lines I believe the work by Professor José María López Piñero to have been enormously important. First his studies, excellent in quality and always in association with the magnificent bibliometrics of María Luz Terradas. When did publication take place? Where? How many editions were printed? What languages were they translated into? This is of course the procedure for measuring the impact of an author's work. Concluding this long list of citations and influences, I wonder how many people are familiar with Félix de Azara, named on every page of Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle. I mean just the name, not his works.

López Piñero was a great scholar and left a school of exceptional academics of the history of science, especially medicine. He also founded an Institute which today bears his name where there is a wonderful database of his works and the works by the members of his school. There is, however, one reservation, technical in nature: the López Piñero Institute of the History of Medicine and Science's database has one weakness, namely, its data model, functional specifications, and record standardization. Their visibility is very low.

The Virtual Library of the Salamanca School and Linked Open Data

From the very outset it was clear that the goal was not a repetition of the critical editions published by universities with publication departments completely lacking any effective distribution service, unfortunately a common error. How many times is an old bookseller one's only recourse to find an edition by a highly original thinker whose impact has been negligible, even though he has been studied and even translated from Latin to Spanish. No, our goal was precisely the opposite. We wanted to apply the most advanced positioning methods to achieve high visibility on the web. But that was the least of it.

What was needed, and what has been and is being done, is to use the Linked Open Data model for both the authors and the works forming the Salamanca School. It is a question of what I will now call digital objects, which are simply an author's works after undergoing digitization together with the associated metadata including, of course, a bibliographic description of the work using several systems, all standardized. The idea is to publish the digital objects of the highest quality feasible openly, that is, in Open Access, and to link the digital objects to others by means of a specific technology, i.e., Linked Open Data, as already mentioned.

This technology was presented to the world in 2006 by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the worldwide web, representing a new idea, and better still, a new technology, for linking digital objects available on the web by integrating the TCP/IP communications protocol, i.e., the Internet, and HyperText Markup Language, HTML.

By specifying markup languages from HTML to XML and from XML to RDF, though not only these, Tim Berners-Lee put forward not just a syntax but rather a semantics based on the Same As concept, enabling two digital objects to be conceptually, semantically, and intellectually related by means of a property. In other words, the digital object Comentario Resolutorio de Cambios [Commentary on the Resolution of Money], by Martín de Azpilcueta, can be associated with another work in the form of a digital object, Theorie der Wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung, because both shared common metadata, in particular, data coded in SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), linked together by Same As.

Technically speaking, perhaps it would not be amiss to mention here that Wikipedia, structurally converted to DBpedia, is central to Linked Open Data, or to put it another way, is the central node to which all the information aggregates, like the Polymath Virtual Library in EDM form, are linked (or can be linked). This means that all the links to the Wikipedia in this introduction will be converted into their corresponding DBpedia structured entries. For example, Tomás de Mercado on DBpedia.

Spanish Scholastics and Europeana

From the start the FHL Virtual Libraries have closely implemented all the standardization systems that have been coming into use, in particular, since Spain is a member of the European Union, the standards drawn up by Europeana, the gigantic European database (here is perhaps not the place to recount its origins, the Lund principles or the dispute with Google) since the start of this twenty-first century.

DIGIBÍS, the company the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation interacts with on a daily basis, has made a decisive contribution to this, and the company's DIGIBIB program has been continually evolving to adapt to the different data models, functional specifications, and rules released by Europeana, sometimes months in advance. It is no coincidence that the Project Director of the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation is a member of the Europeana Council of Content Providers and Aggregators Technical Core Group nor that he has been assigned the task of drafting the portion of the forthcoming Europeana white book dealing specifically with digitization.

The program developed by DIGIBÍS has been so effective that most digital and virtual libraries contributing to Europeana do so via DIGIBIB. Around 96 % are made through the Hispana aggregator, also developed by DIGIBÍS.

However, putting the programmes, projects, and objectives that go beyond Europeana fully into effect would have been difficult without the help of the MAPFRE Foundation, and its generosity and foresight are acknowledged here. A significant proportion of the functionalities are described in the paper that we presented at the 77th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, entitled "Data Aggregation and Dissemination of Authority Records through Linked Open Data".

We can try to summarize the idea in basic terms. Just as the OpenSearch Protocol can be used to query Europeana's SRU server, the database itself can be queried via its API and the results compiled transferred automatically in the form of new records. Then, after suitable cleansing, all sorts of modifications can be worked employing the new records, and, above all, they can be used to furnish links to already aggregated data.

In this way, for instance, entering the query term Azpilcueta in the FHL Virtual Libraries returns 75 records, whereas API OpenSearch automatically returns up to 248 records in Europeana. The tool that has been developed is a completely new computer application that is not limited merely to record recovery but actually updates the database with the new records, that is, in this case, the FHL Virtual Libraries, after first converting the metadata as appropriate. It interacts with the Europeana database and the librarian who, in the role of knowledge engineer, specifies authors and works for execution on an SRU server, e.g., Europeana, after precise bibliographic identification, which requires detailed knowledge of the subject area.

Thus, as we are trying to show, this is not just record capture but record aggregation into pre-existing information structures in the FHL Virtual Library databases, a much richer outcome.

Obviously, these features are extremely useful, in that, just as it can be executed on Europeana, or perhaps better yet, on Hispana, the same operation can be carried out using OAIster, the world's largest – though Europeana grows closer day by day – harvester of records of digital objects in digital and virtual library repositories outside Europeana, because, as everyone knows, it is a truly worldwide collective catalogue.

Many of these ideas, particularly the underpinnings of the entire data model, functional specifications, and rules have been dealt with in great detail in a widely disseminated paper entitled "La Biblioteca Virtual: concepto y función" [The Virtual Library, concept and operation].

IberoAmerica is the area in the world with the sparsest representation, but holding the 77th IFLA Conference in Puerto Rico was a springboard to start up relationships with our IberoAmerican colleagues, and clear advances are being made in projects including Chile, Mexico, and Peru. Though Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi's great experience has been a big help, it will take us some time to carry out our project in IberoAmerica, though this tool will certainly be used not only for the Salamanca School but also for all the other subsets, libraries, and collections making up the FHL Virtual Libraries (in fact, for reasons outside the scope of these considerations, semiautomatic cataloguing of Galician polymath authors has been carried out and has yielded excellent results, just as it has for the authors making up the Salamanca School).

As the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation approaches, Europeana has published a series of documents setting out in greater detail the data model, functional specifications, and standards for this vast European-wide project. These are the Europeana Data Model Primer, released on 26 October 2011, the Europeana Data Model Mapping Guidelines, released the next day, and the Europeana Factsheet, along with prospects for the immediate future and the medium term, set out in the Final Technical & Logical Architecture and Future Work Recommendations released on 31 October.

With this in mind, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Digibib program that has been used to implement the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library of Polymath Authors, and in particular the Virtual Library of the Salamanca School, fits the above-mentioned set of standards and rules like a glove. The same can be said of the Final Report of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, released in three separate documents, the Final Report, Use Cases and Datasets, Value Vocabularies and Metadata Element Sets, all on 25 October 2011.

The Use Cases include the Ignacio Larramendi Virtual Library of Polymath Authors under the name Polymath Virtual Library – and only 12 cases worldwide are cited. Adding to this burst of standardization activity, the agreement between Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America on 21 October 2011, promoted by Harvard University Library with the essential support of the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution, the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation's project can be said to be closely in keeping with standards and policy being set at the highest technical, political, and administrative levels worldwide.

DIGIBÍS' efforts to keep a worldwide perspective and stay up to date, its DIGIBIB library management program, and the other applications and programs for all sorts of memory institutions deserve recognition..

The Salamanca School

As has been said, at no time did the School ever exist as such, but a certain association with the San Esteban Monastery in the town of Tormes can be identified. At this point a little-known aspect of the Cisnerian reforms needs to be explained.

Cisneros, like other eminent Renaissance Churchmen, realized that the Church was in need of profound reform (it is significant that two of our greatest saints and writers were both reformers; I am referring, of course, to Saint Teresa of Jesus and Saint John of the Cross). With this in mind, Cisneros tried to reform the University of Salamanca but was thwarted by the university's charter and foot-dragging by the faculty, and the "Cardinal from Madrid" – historically inaccurate and said tongue in cheek, since Cisneros was from Torrelaguna – founded the new and now famous university in Alcalá de Henares, which, as surprising as it might be, did not offer any degrees in law but focused solely on reformed theology studies.

What would have happened if Cisneros had been younger when the Habsburg king Charles first arrived in Spain and Cisneros could have acted as his advisor instead of the king's Flemish and Italian courtiers? The Cisnerian reform was very close – just as Saint Teresa's and Saint John of the Cross' reforms were close – to Luther's reforms, which, it goes without saying, took root in large measure thanks to the political interests of certain princes of the states making up the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation.

And what would have happened if the Complutensian Polyglot Bible had reached Rome instead of being nearly completely lost in a shipwreck? In the end, Erasmus' translation of the Gospels was based on a single manuscript, whereas the Polyglot Bible had been based on almost 70. The Spanish Bible scholar Diego López de Zúñiga sharply rebuked Erasmus, who politely acknowledged that he was in his debt. However, the translation that was revised and reprinted was Erasmus', not the Polyglot. Years later the Antwerp Polyglot, overseen by another exceptional scholar, Benito Arias Montano, also had extremely bad luck. It was by then the time of Bibles published in vernacular languages that were far from unsophisticated, and it is to be noted that modern German has been built on the foundation of Luther's Bible, just as Shakespeare's English is built on the King James version.

Nevertheless, Cisneros was able to influence the monastic rules of the San Esteban Monastery, and this unquestionably had enormous repercussions, the main one being the Salamanca School. Though I should state quite plainly that some of those who are commonly regarded as being members of the Salamanca School never actually entered a classroom there or lived in any of the monastery's cells.

Who are the members of the Salamanca School?

It is not easy to state definitely which authors are members of the Salamanca School. The selection for this Virtual Library of the Salamanca School was based on the judgment of the librarian who has penned this Introduction.

It was based on a broad set of bibliographic sources and critical studies, but still I am sure that there will be dissenting voices. As I have already mentioned, many of the authors had ties to the San Esteban Monastery in Salamanca, where they lived and taught, though they also did the same at the University of Salamanca itself. Even so, there are authors like Juan de Mariana, doubtless one of the greatest minds Spain has produced, who neither studied nor taught there. Juan de Mariana held chairs first in Palermo and then in Paris, but after five years, during which he also earned his doctorate, he fell sick and retired to Toledo in 1574, where he lived in his cell, given over to his writing, until 1624. His writings are closely related to the other members of the School.

By contrast, other authors are quite directly related. After passing through Paris, as was nearly de rigueur, Francisco de Vitoria held a professorship at another of the School's key centres, the San Gregorio College in Valladolid, where he taught theology until he won the Chair in Theology at Salamanca by competitive examination in 1526. There he taught Melchor Cano, Domingo Báñez, and Domingo de Soto, Dominicans like him.

Cano studied in Salamanca, where as we have just said he was a student of Francisco de Vitoria, and he taught at the San Esteban Monastery. Following a career similar to those of other members of the School, he was sent to the San Gregorio College in Valladolid, where he studied with Bartolomé de Carranza and Friar Luis de Granada.

The interrelationships between all these authors are to be noted. While we have emphasized the tremendous importance of Martín de Azpilcueta as an economist, in his time he was known as the illustrious jurist who, from 1577 to his death, defended Bartolomé de Carranza, who, as Archbishop of Toledo and Cardinal Primate of Spain, no less, faced an accusation by the Inquisition. Azpilcueta was a professor at the University of Salamanca for 14 years, and his students included scholars who clearly belong to the Salamanca School, such as Diego de Covarrubias. Azpilcueta not only taught at Salamanca, he was also a professor at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, re-established not long before by the Portuguese Crown. Salamanca and Coimbra were very closely connected, and Azpilcueta was not the only professor to teach at both universities.

Covarrubias was Archbishop of Cuenca, and we have a magnificent portrait of him done by El Greco. He studied not only with Azpilcueta but also with Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto. He was one of a number of authors who took part in the discussions of the natural rights of native Americans and came down on the antislavery side. In matters of economics, with Luis de Molina he developed a theory of the subjective nature of value and price; in keeping with modern economic theory, he based the value of goods on agreement as to the price freely reached by buyer and seller, and ultimately it was scarcity or abundance, what we would today refer to as supply and demand, that was responsible for both value and price. Speaking of Luis de Molina, he is noteworthy not only for his contribution to economics but also for his position on free will, harshly criticized by Pascal in his Provincial Letters. Luis de Molina was a Jesuit and was strongly supported by the members of his order, whereas he was criticized by the Dominicans.

Domingo de Soto was another of the great minds of the sixteenth century, and there is virtually no aspect of human knowledge that he did not write about, bringing his vast erudition to bear. His contribution to the birth of modern science is extremely interesting, mainly as it related to free falling bodies, later developed by Galileo, who certainly was familiar with the work setting out de Soto's theory. He also took part in the disputes on the native American question and took over Melchor Cano's chair at the University of Salamanca.

Domingo de Soto was a member of the Commission that met in Valladolid during 1550 and 1551 to debate the native American question, that is, Spain's right of dominion and the natives' natural rights. The dispute had arisen from the controversy surrounding the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas and the opposing position taken by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda.

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda is mainly known thanks to that controversy, but he also carried out other, very important studies after his stay at the Royal Spanish College in Bologna, where he came into contact with the humanist tradition. In 1548 he translated Aristotle's Politics, and indeed in large measure based his defense of the legitimacy of the conquest of the Americas on Aristotle's teachings. He was an outstanding Greek scholar and revised the Greek version of the New Testament at the behest of Cardinal Cayetano. Charles V appointed him as his chronicler. Strongly against the new laws of 1542, his influence had a hand in having them rescinded, which brought Bartolomé de las Casas back to Spain, and in turn, after some polemical writings by the latter, led to the Valladolid debates referred to above.

Of all the authors of the Salamanca School, Bartolomé de las Casas is unquestionably the best known internationally, although in point of fact he lacked Francisco de Vitoria's original thinking. His writings can be held to be the spark that gave rise to the various controversies and conferences mentioned above, in which most of the members of the Salamanca School became embroiled. The results are the School's fundamental contribution to both modern international law and the origin of human rights theory. Along with other leading members of the Salamanca School, he studied at the San Gregorio College in Valladolid, which took barely 20 students but brought Bartolomé de las Casas into touch with Melchor Cano, Luis de Granada, and Francisco de Vitoria himself.

It is also striking that Juan de la Peña, another important figure in the Salamanca School, also attended San Gregorio College with the others and that he played a major role in the Inquisition's trial of his former teacher, Bartolomé de Carranza, who as we have already seen was defended by Azpilcueta in his final years. His works went unpublished until they were issued by one of the primary specialists in critical studies of the Salamanca School, Luciano Pereña, editor of what to date is the main effort to bring together most of the authors making up the School in what is known as the Corpus Hispanorum de Pace; and indeed, Spanish culture's debt to Luciano Pereña will never be repaid. Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi commissioned this eminent political scientist, jurist, and historian to put together an anthology of de la Peña's works in the exceptional MAPFRE 1492 Collections series entitled La idea de la justicia en la conquista de América [The concept of justice in the conquest of America], published in 1992.

It is peculiar that Juan Roa Dávila was born in Alcalá de Henares, and it is highly likely that his family was involved in some sort of university activity. He studied law at the University of Salamanca and joined the Company of Jesus. The highly controversial nature of some of his works, particularly De Regnorum Iustitia, in which he advocated democratic control by the people, if this concept can be used for a sixteenth-century author with the meaning it has today, as a result of which he was forced to leave Spain and take refuge in Rome.

From today's perspective Tomás de Mercado is one of the most appealing members of the Salamanca School. In fact, he spent much of his life in Mexico, where he joined the Dominican Order. He finished his studies at the University of Salamanca, and thanks to publication, in 1569, of Los tratos y contratos de mercaderes y tratantes [Dealings and Contracts of Merchants and Dealers] written at the request of Sevillian merchants and republished in 1571, this time in Seville, under the title Summa de tratos y contratos [Manual of Dealings and Contracts], he is one of the authors whose works had the most influence on daily commercial practice.

Mercado was very open-minded regarding interest rates and studied the quantity theory of money. His works were published in Spanish, and hence were highly influential among members of the Seville merchant class, many of whom could not read Latin. Unlike the theories usually attributed to Christians and old aristocratic families, taking Hesiod and Plutarch, no less, as his sources, Tomás de Mercado praised the social dignity that comes from commerce. His Summa de tratos y contratos, notably, was one of the books subject to the system of censure applied to books of the period in Spain, particularly by the Crown of Castille, along with a book by the reverend father Friar Luis de León, who held the chair in Theology at the University of Salamanca.

Friar Luis de Leon, indeed, was not only a superb master of style, a sublime poet, and an extremely distinguished translator but was also linked to the Salamanca School in matters of doctrine. He not only created an entire theory of politics, entitled De legibus, but also, for example, wrote a report on the operation of quicksilver mines in Peru by Pedro de Contreras in 1588, which shows to what extent Friar Luis de Leon was in fact a polymath, capable of cultivating all genres and dealing with any subject. He had studied with Melchor Cano and was a classmate of Cipriano de la Huerga, an orientalist and professor of Bible studies at Alcalá de Henares who instructed Luis de León in oriental languages, Hebrew in particular, though later he was to depart from Catholic orthodoxy in large measure. Based on his mastery of languages, Friar Luis de Leon prepared various versions of works directly from the Hebrew which were hotly contested by other intellectuals of his time, chief among them the Dominican Bartolomé de Medina (Friar Luis was an Augustinian).

Bartolomé de Medina has gone down in history as one of those responsible for sending Friar Luis de Leon to prison, but even so his intellectual contributions were extremely important. A student of Francisco de Vitoria and later professor of theology at the University of Salamanca, he is known mainly for creating the doctrine of probabilism, which was to be of such significance in the defense of freedom and free will. This theory of probabilism was defended and, above all, spread by Jesuit theologians, who took it with them throughout Europe and America. Probabilism was fought tenaciously by the Jansenists and, in particular, by Blaise Pascal, who, as we have said, attacked Bartolomé de Medina and other authors like Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez without denigrating them, as has often been the case when theories have proved to be influential. Probabilism is one of the cornerstones of what is known as casuistry, a mainstay of the Jesuits and directly opposed to the determinism espoused by the Jansenists virtually to a man.

Another member of the Salamanca School who worked to develop the theory of probabilism was the Jesuit Gabriel Vázquez de Belmonte. He held professorships at Alcalá de Henares and at Rome, doing most of his philosophical and theological writing at Alcalá. He signed some of his books using the pen name Belomontanus in reference to his birthplace. Somewhat surprisingly, Francisco Murcia de la Llana, the bureaucrat famous for his corrigenda to many of the core books of Spanish literature in his role as "His Majesty's General Editor of Books" from 1609 to 1635, especially part II of Don Quijote, produced a compendium of Gabriel Vázquez's philosophy in 1617.

Domingo Báñez was also linked to the San Esteban Monastery in Salamanca, which he entered in 1546, studying under both Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, subsequently pursuing further studies under Melchor Cano and Pedro de Sotomayor. Báñez was confessor to Saint Teresa, whom he helped and advised in her reform efforts. After a brief stay at the San Esteban Monastery, he transferred to the San Gregorio College in Valladolid – as did so many of the others mentioned here, in one direction or the other – where he was Rector. Like many other authors in the Salamanca School, he came under investigation by the Inquisition; still, he sat the competitive exams for the Durando Chair at Salamanca, previously held by Bartolomé de Medina, already referred to above, and upon the latter's death he succeeded him in the "Prima Luce" Chair in Theology. He, like many of the members of the Salamanca School, was involved in the De auxiliis controversy, one of the recurring questions addressed by the Spanish Scholastics during the period, in which the issue of free will was always present. In defending the innate freedom of human beings and addressing the possible constraints on free will, it was not hard for certain members of the School to approach positions close to those of Protestantism, and in any event, the Dominican Báñez can be said to represent the opposite extreme from the doctrine of the Jesuit Luis de Molina.

The influence all these ideas were to have on Baruch Spinoza will be obvious to readers of his works, especially his superb Ethics, particularly in light of his private library, which contained numerous books in Spanish, especially works by Saavedra Fajardo and Quevedo.

Though it may seem paradoxical, the establishment of the University of Coimbra was an essential pillar of the development of the Salamanca School. In 1537 King Juan III of Portugal reinstated the university at Coimbra, though it went back to the Estudo Geral, which had been founded in Lisbon in 1290 and moved to Coimbra in 1308. But it was in the sixteenth century, after being re-established, when it rose to prominence, and a direct relationship arose between Salamanca and Coimbra, to the point where, with some frequency, the professors of these two universities would exchange chairs. Pedro de Fonseca was unquestionably one of the most outstanding figures of the time, being known at the "Portuguese Aristotle", which gives us a clear idea of his philosophical underpinnings.

Pedro da Fonseca was of central importance not just as the author of his own works but also as general editor of the Cursus philosophicus conimbricensis, which, together with the salmanticensis, was to play such an important role throughout the world. It should be borne in mind that these courses had an enormous impact throughout Europe, especially in Germany, and it is surprising to note how often many of the greatest German philosophers were the offspring of or were educated in circles linked to Protestant pastors who had attended these courses and studied the texts of Francisco Suárez referred to above. Their influence even reached China. There is a very interesting relationship between da Fonseca's doctrine and the doctrine propounded by Luis de Molina regarding the controversy concerning free will: often the doctrine widely espoused by Luis de Molina had first been sketched out by Pedro da Fonseca, particularly when Portuguese sources are consulted.

Juan de Mariana, spoken of earlier, touched on nearly all of the subject areas attributed to the Salamanca School. He was a theologian and the economist who published the memorable De monetae mutatione; the political thinker whose major works include De rege et regis institutione, twice burned in Paris following the assassinations of Henry III and Henry IV of France. One of the more intricate stories of intellectual relations in Spain in the sixteenth century took shape when Juan de Mariana came to the defense of the orthodoxy of the Antwerp Polyglot – and in particular of its editor, Benito Arias Montano – a controversy in which Friar Luis de León was also caught up, though this time in the little-known role of accuser. In the end, it turned out that Arias Montano belonged to a small, highly heterodox monastery, even though Philip II of Spain had commissioned him not only to edit a polyglot bible but also to superintend the extraordinary El Escorial library, which was not exactly lacking in all sorts of highly unorthodox works, rather the contrary.

Thus, a reading of Isaac Newton's Temple of Salomon makes clear to what extent the interests of Juan de Herrera and Philip II were not so unlike the esoteric interests of Isaac Newton, ostensibly a highly orthodox follower of the Church of England. The author of the Principia Mathematica cited not just works by Juan de Herrera but many other works we are now aware of as a result of the ever more thorough study of Newton's library. However, Juan de Mariana has come down to posterity thanks to his History of Spain, which first appeared in Latin and then in Spanish, updated to the nineteenth century by various authors. This work has caught the collective imagination of Spaniards like few others, as so aptly put in the famous work by Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition.

By contrast, with his exceptional scientific contributions to the fields of anthropology and natural science, José de Acosta falls within the Spanish scientific tradition, always underappreciated. He studied at the College of the Company of Jesus and afterwards at the University of Alcalá de Henares, but from the age of 32 he worked and studied in America, first in Peru and then later in New Spain. On his return to Spain he taught at San Gregorio College in Valladolid, where else, and ended up printing his sermons in Salamanca. He ended his career as Rector of the University of Salamanca when it was at its apex. The 1590 edition of his Historia natural y moral de las Indias [Natural and Moral History of the Indies] has a subtitle that merits repeating here by way of showing the vast scope of this study. It reads: "concerning the noteworthy things of Heaven and the elements, metals, plants, and animals thereof and the rights, ceremonies, laws and government, and wars of the Indians". This work went through a large number of editions and was translated into many different languages in many countries.

While we have here mentioned the most outstanding from among the most important members of the School, Diego Pérez de Mesa might appear to be a lesser figure; however, like Acosta, he is a splendid example of a Renaissance Man, publishing writings on mathematics, in particular geometry, on the art of seamanship, at the time a highly reserved subject, since it played a crucial role in the geopolitics of the Rule of the Sea, and he also brought his store of knowledge to bear in his studies on geography. Like the other extraordinary polymaths in the Salamanca School, he took his Política o razón de estado [Politics or Reason of State] from Aristotle. Unfortunately, a considerable body of his work remains unpublished, but in any case the Virtual Library of the Salamanca School intends to make it digitally available. In fact, the Complutense University of Madrid has published his Tratado de astronomía [Treatise on Astronomy] on line as part of its meritorious Dioscorides Digital Library project, making it available to readers.

Perhaps it is appropriate to close the list of polymaths making up the Salamanca School with one of the most important thinkers, philosophers, theologians, and political scholars Spain has ever known, Francisco Suárez. He was born and died one year after Miguel de Cervantes, and I believe both these dates to be telling. A Jesuit, he studied both at Salamanca and at Coimbra and died in Lisbon, which at the time was under the rule of the Crown of Spain.

Without undertaking serious study it is certainly hard to measure Suárez's influence on modern philosophy, but as reported by Xavier Zubiri, Heidegger said of him, "Der ist der Mann" [He is the man], meaning that the paradigm shift often attributed to Descartes was in fact erected on his work. While this claim may well be disputable, the importance of his work is not, as well documented in the Appendix José Luis Abellán devoted to Suárez in his Historia crítica del pensamiento español [Critical History of Spanish Thought], which lists the extremely large number of editions his work has gone through, and it is further borne out by the use of his writings as textbooks at both Catholic and Protestant universities.

Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, perhaps the greatest and most knowledgeable of all historians of philosophy in Spain, indisputably the creator of the discipline, though later studies have in many cases seen fit to amend or qualify what he had to say, affirmed that Spain had borne witness to six currents or schools of philosophy that truly attained worldwide scope, namely, those based on the works of Seneca, Averroes, Maimonides, Llull, Vives and Francisco Suárez.

He attained fundamental significance as a jurist in the fields of both international law and natural law, and the concept of the social compact is already present in his work. He also set forth the principle of democracy, subsequently expanded by Locke, which as has been seen, led to the basic texts for the political constitution of the United States, as has been fully documented by Eduardo Nicol in La vocación humana [The Human Vocation], published in 1954, setting out comparative tables that have been included in all the book's editions in the FHL Virtual Libraries.

Here at the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation we are fully convinced that digital versions of Suárez's works will make possible thorough study of his many contributions, something that can be difficult to achieve given the volume of his work and, perhaps, because his writings were basically intended for university students – that is, they were, so to speak, textbooks. In short, Suárez was the culmination of the Salamanca School, and he is the most representative example of the Jesuit leg of the School –there is no scope here to do more than point out the evolution undergone by the Salamanca School as a result of the increasing replacement of the Dominicans and Augustinians in its ranks by members of the Company of Jesus.

Conclusion

The nearly 1,000 works that have been compiled in this Virtual Library of the Salamanca School from libraries throughout Europe are the outcome of a two-pronged endeavour: on the one hand, bibliographic analysis and conceptual study, and on the other, high-level computer analysis and development of advanced computer applications.

The Virtual Library of the Salamanca School is – perhaps for the first time in Spain – the direct result of drawing semantic relationships between works and their authors, between subjects and the titles of works, between spaces and times, using the technology and, above all, the radical concept of information on the worldwide web, as adumbrated by the Semantic Web and as significantly given shape by the Linked Open Data project.

Additionally, it is largely compliant with the models and guidelines of the W3C and the Europeana European digital library, and, going a step further, it advances firmly in the direction set out in Vannevar Bush's visionary As we may think (1945) –except, of course, for those familiar with Ars Magna by Ramon Llull (ca. 1275).