During Renaissance plague remained endemic and virulent, producing major epidemics in most regions every generation or so. The Milan epidemic of 1630-1631 killed 60,000 people, 46 percent of the city's population; the London epidemic of 1664-1665 killed 70,000. For reasons that remain mysterious, however, the disease receded after the 1660s, and after a last, terrible epidemic in 1720-1722, centering on the French port city of Marseilles, it disappeared from Europe altogether. The history of famine followed a roughly similar chronology. Food shortages led to actual starvation as late as the mid-17th century in England, and still later in France: the great famine of 1693-1694 is estimated to have reduced French population by 10 percent. Food shortages continued in the eighteenth century, and a last great subsistence crisis came in the mid-19th century; but Europeans' experiences of food shortage after 1710 were essentially different from that of the seventeenth century. Before 1710, for instance, French food prices might triple or quadruple in years of harvest failure; eighteenth-century crises led to a doubling of prices, still a serious burden for consumers, but far less likely to bring outright starvation. Freed from the experience of starvation and plague (though certainly not from many other natural catastrophes), eighteenth-century Europeans could view the world with significantly more confidence than their early modern predecessors.

An abrupt decline in military violence after 1713 meant that eighteenth-century Europeans also had a fundamentally different experience of warfare. Organized violence had marked the early modern period to an unprecedented degree, with conflicts extending across the Continent from west to east and south to north. With truce only between 1609 and 1621, Spain and the northern Netherlands fought from 1566 until 1648, a conflict that also touched Spanish Italy (where troops were recruited and organized) and parts of Switzerland (through which they had to march to reach the northern battlefields). Spanish troops also attempted to invade England in 1588, assisted the Catholic side during the French Wars of Religion in 1589-1594, and invaded northern France in 1597; after some skirmishing in the 1620s and 1630s, Spain and France returned to all-out war between 1635 and 1659. Meanwhile the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) embroiled central Europe in the most destructive of the century's conflicts. The small German states fought one another, their overlord the Austrian Habsburg emperors, and a series of outside powers--Denmark, Sweden, France, and Spain--that had joined in to secure territorial gain and to defend the European balance of power.

Relative peace prevailed during the mid-17th century, despite the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 1650s and 1660s and French territorial expansion in the 1660s. But Louis XIV's invasion of the Netherlands in 1672 opened a new round of Europe-wide conflict, which continued with only short breaks until 1713. Louis's armies were larger than any Europe had previously seen, and even the ethics of war seemed to have deterioriated. Under orders from Versailles, French armies systematically devastated the Palatinate in 1689, suggesting to horrified contemporaries that pillaging had become a tool of state policy, rather than a crime of angry soldiers. The financial, demographic, and psychological effects were so exhausting that most of Europe remained at peace for a generation thereafter. Only in 1740 did the principal European powers resume their warlike habits, and then, though armies remained large and destructive, newly effective military discipline protected civilians from their worst effects. Thus 1713 marked a genuine turning point in European social history.

Measuring the social effects of 17th century warfare has proven a complex historical problem. In central Europe the destructiveness was enormous and clearly visible. Over the course of the Thirty Years' War, historians have estimated, the German population dropped by 40 percent in the countryside, and 33 percent in the cities; in some regions the losses were still greater. This war was the century's greatest military disaster, but even local conflicts might have comparable consequences: troop movements around Paris during the Fronde of the Princes in 1652-1653 brought a threefold increase in the region's death rates. Combatants died in great numbers (studies of one Swedish village during the Thirty Years' War show a survival rate after twenty years of 7 percent among conscripted troops); further deaths were caused by the spread of epidemic diseases. But war did much more damage by disrupting already fragile economies, as soldiers took food and livestock for themselves, destroyed farms and other capital, and disrupted trade circuits. . .

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