"The eighteenth century saw its share of wars in Europe, but these were markedly less violent and unrestrained than the wars of the previous century, where the toxic admixture of religion and social revolution had produced slaughter on the battlefields and atrocities against innocent civilians. In the Age of Enlightenment, as superstition and religion appeared to be giving way before science and reason, Europeans had a brief spell of hope that humanity, or at least the European part of it, was getting more peaceable and learning to control its passions. Observers believed that war was getting less cruel; Emeric de Vattel, one of the influential early theorists of international law, remarked that ‘the Nations of Europe almost always carry on war with great forbearance and generosity’. War, or so it was hoped, was becoming civilised, fought between professionals and with proper respect for the rules of war. By contrast with what was to come or had happened during the wars of religion, eighteenth-century wars were ‘cabinet’ ones, undertaken for clear and limited goals, relatively easy to stop and neatly concluded with an agreement or treaty."