A Croatian Conquistador in Mayan Yucatan: Vinko Paletin’s De jure et justitia belli contra Indos

Sa？etak This article opens with a very brief survey of the life of Vinko Paletin, who had fought with the Spaniards against the Yucatec Maya under the command of Francisco de Montejo the Younger, before he joined the Dominican order and produced several works on geography, cartography and conquest. Paletin’s Latin treatise, De jure et justitia belli contra Indos, based on a Spanish work composed in 1557-58, combined political and juridical thought with travel narrative and historiography to affirm the right of the Catholic kings of Spain to conquer and rule the peoples of the New World. The second part of the discussion sets out the structure of the De jure et justitia and its divergences from the earlier Spanish text, and summarises its principal arguments. The final part compares the Latin and Spanish versions of the author’s description of the buildings at the Mayan city of Chichen Itza. If they are considered together, the two accounts recall that of the temple of Juno in the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid: this evocation underscores Paletin’s thesis that the architecture and the written script to be found in Chichen Itza could be attributed to the Carthaginians