ABSTRACT
The historiography of the last several decades has done much to explode the myth of "the serfdom" and to emphasize the existence of variations and mixed forms of economic relationships shaped by chronologies and locations. Seventeenth-century documents, however, say a great deal about these lesser-known and silent victims of war. The interpretation presented here, however, does not address global change or, for that matter, even large regional changes, nor does it consider the long-term shifts that environmental historians have studied extensively: warm and cool cycles, deforestation, desertification, irrigation-caused salinization, species extinctions or near-extinctions, or soil erosion. Nonetheless, it is possible to explicate how wars and their aftermath affected communities by homing in on quotidian affairs and by focusing on the mostly small-scale initiatives that individuals and groups undertook to recover or meliorate their surroundings.
