In the utterly religious world of 16th-century Europe, the most important legal authority was power over consciences. At a time of confessional crisis, imperial theologians from Salamanca lent their assistance to the Counter-Reformation by employing the amalgam of a moral theology concentrating on individual confession and Roman legal principles they found in the works of Thomas Aquinas. These would offer the means to instruct Christians on what attitude to adopt towards the treatment of the indigenous population of the New World and what to think of the incessant wars between Christian princes and the expansion of a commercial ethic that was hard to fit with old moral theology.