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Alfonso de Cartagena on the affair of the Canaries (1436–37): humanist rhetoric and the idea of the nation-state in fifteenth–century Castile by Lawrance, Jeremy

“…It sets the dispute in the context of medieval theories about Just War and the papal or imperial power to authorize such conquests for the purposes of evangelization or trade, and points to its place within the broader perspective of later disputes on the legality of the Spanish conquest of America; but then shows that Cartagena deliberately sought to remove the question from the ambit of these discussions and to construct instead an argument that the Canaries belonged by right to the ancient Vizigothic province of Tingitania (Roman North Africa), and hence to the Vizigothic monarchy’s heirs, the kings of Castile. In order to dispose of the inconvenient fact that the last Vizigothic king, Roderick, was separated from the reigning Castilian monarch, Juan II, by some seven centuries of Islamic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, Cartagena developed a theory that the ‘right of rule’ (ius principandi) of a nation resides not in the person of its monarch, but in the transfer to him of that right by its ‘people’. …”
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