   In his On the Civil Power, Francisco de Vitoria (ca. 1485–1546) asked whether non-Christians have legitimate sovereigns in view of the Spanish discovery of the ‘New World’. He states: ‘Richard FitzRalph, archbishop of Armagh, a man of otherwise blameless character and intelligence, certainly argues in his De pauperitate Saluatoris that not merely unbelief but any mortal sin impedes any kind of power or dominion (dominium) or jurisdiction, either public or private; in the mistaken belief that the true title and foundation of all power is grace.’ Vitoria fought against the notion of dominium through grace since, as a consequence, Christians would be entitled to take the lands, wealth and property from the native Americans, because Christians could and should exercise dominium over all unbelievers and over the whole world. This, of course, would render natural rights, or those which belong to human beings precisely because they are human, null and void. It was natural law theory which enabled de Vitoria to mount an impressive argument against this position. I think that if we consider FitzRalph’s intentions in developing his theory of dominion, he would have reacted strongly against the injustice perpetrated by later upholders of grace-based dominium. Whatever his polemical and sometimes extreme positions such as he writings against the Franciscans, he had put forward a principle which was intended to bring some measure of justice into law and to deal with the ‘sinfulness’ of the Franciscan poverty-fiction and he would never have ended up with defending laws without a principle of justice regarding first nation peoples in the Americas in the sixteenth century and later.