The burgeoning age of exploration, exemplified by the voyages of Columbus, Magellan and Vasco de Gama, had further weakened traditional ideas of right and wrong by bringing to the attention of Europeans different cultures and moralities and suggesting to some that, in the words of the great sixteenth-century French humanist and essayist Michel de Montaigne, ‘The laws of conscience which we say are born from nature, are born of custom’. There was, for Montaigne, no absolute truth.
