Charity has a rich association with European international law. As a Christian virtue, charity drove the imperial exploits of Christian missions during the Age of Discovery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is when the early Christian writers of a modern, European international law such as Francisco de Vitoria (1486–1546), Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), Richard Zouche (1590–1661), Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Cornelis van Bynkershoek (1673–1743) emerged, and the Peace of Westphalia is said to have established a law of nations amongst “a European society of sovereign states.” Christian charity, it was believed, offered non-Christian peoples in the “New World” eternal salvation, and it became a prime justification for the universalization of a European international law – all of which Anghie points out resulted from the process by which European doctrines and beliefs “were transferred to, or imposed upon, the non-European world, principally through the mechanism of colonialism.”