What is today known as the "School of Salamanca" emerged in a time of fundamental political, religious, economic, and cultural transformations. Many of these were linked to early modern (proto-)globalisation and its consequences: the Iberian empires were expanding and their territories soon spanned the globe. Europeans encountered territories as well as cultural and political systems they had not known before. At the same time, reformations divided the res publica christiana, leading to huge political turmoil, wars, and the formation of different confessional cultures. The media revolution enabled communication at speeds and scales hitherto unknown and facilitated access to old and an avalanche of new knowledge. Not least because of these changes, early modern republics and monarchies, empires, religious orders, and the Roman Curia refined their techniques of governance. It was in this context that new universities were founded and traditional ones grew, professionalisation increased, and the sciences flourished.The University of Salamanca, founded in 1218, played a key role in this development, particularly because the Catholic Kings had converted it into their privileged site of knowledge production. In Salamanca, humanists, jurists, cosmographers, theologians, and canonists trained the imperial elite. Here, future bishops, members of the Audiencias, jurists, and missionaries studied the measurement of space and time, the economy, language, faith, law, and justice and injustice. The preeminent scholars of the time came to Salamanca to teach, publishing houses established their officinae in the city, and probably in few places in the empire did so much information about the explorations and discoveries in the Caribbean and the Americas -including the violence, exploitation, and abuses committed by the European invaders -circulate as it did in Salamanca. Missionaries returned to their alma mater, university professors came from New Spain to publish their books, and members of the powerful religious orders sent reports to their monasteries. The Castilian elite asked for advice and a figure no less than the emperor himself repeatedly consulted
