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Franciscan friars were everywhere in the early modern Catholic world, a world that stretched from the Americas, through Western and Central Europe, to the Middle East and Asia. This global brotherhood was as deeply entangled in the great religious wars that convulsed Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as it was in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. While the political and imperial theories of Dominicans like Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de Las Casas, who took the theology of Thomas Aquinas as their starting point, are well-known, this has not been the case for Franciscan thinking until now.The Franciscans and their allies built a body of political writings around the theology of John Duns Scotus (1265/6–1308), and this book presents a wide selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotist writings on politics, warfare, and empire in English for the first time. Beginning with Scotus's own doctrine on the forced baptism of Jews, this collection translates John Mair (1467–1550) on European imperialism and holy war, Alfonso de Castro (1495–1558) on the Schmalkaldic War of the 1540s, Juan Focher (1497–1572) on the war against the Chichimeca Indians of Mexico, and John Punch on the British and Irish Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s.The availability of these primary sources for teaching and research will clarify the connection between religion, politics, and imperialism in the early modern world.

The Reformed (or Calvinist) universities of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe hosted rich, Latin-language conversations on the nature of politics, the powers of kings and magistrates, resistance, revolution, and religious warfare. Nevertheless, it is too often assumed that Reformed political thought did not develop beyond John Calvin's Institutes of 1559. This book remedies this problem, presenting extracts from major Reformed theologians and intellectuals (including Peter Martyr Vermigli, Guillaume de Buc, David Pareus, Lambert Daneau, and Bartholomäus Keckermann) which demonstrate both continuity and change in Reformed political argument. These men taught in France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Low Countries, and England, between the 1540s and 1660s, but they were read in universities throughout the North Atlantic world into the eighteenth century. Should all political action be subject to God's direct command? Were humans capable of using their own God-given reason to tell right from wrong? Was it ever just to resist tyrants? Was religious difference enough by itself to justify war? Their political doctrines often aroused the greatest controversy in their own time; this is generally the first time that these extracts from their works have been translated into English. These texts and translations are accompanied by an introduction placing these authors in the context of the great European religious wars, advice on further reading, and a full bibliography.