The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) 161agricultural productivity. It would be decades before the German states
recovered from the Thirty Years’ War.
Although much of the religious settlement of the Treaty of Westphalia
would endure, dynastic rivalries still raged. France had emerged from its reli
gious w'ars with a stronger monarchy; Louis XIII had made his state more
centralized and powerful. France’s rivals, too, would extend their authority
within their own states. In the mid-seventeenth century, Europe would enter
the era of monarchical absolutism. The most powerful European states—
above all, Louis XIV’s France—would enter a period of aggressive territorial
expansion. Dynastic wars would help shape the European experience from
the mid-seventeenth century to the French Revolution of 1789.