ABSTRACT
After 1660 the Baltic region enjoyed forty years of almost uninterrupted peace. The focus of European military and diplomatic activity during this period centred to a much greater extent than in the previous century on western Europe, where the consequences of French ambitions involved all that country’s neighbours in almost continuous warfare, and on south-eastern Europe, where the renewed struggle between Habsburg and Turk also involved Russia and Poland. The Baltic returned to the somewhat peripheral position it had occupied before 1620.
