Prisoner-of-war camp relatively small size of armies, meant there was little need for any form of camp to hold prisoners of war. The Peace of Westphalia, a series of treaties signed between May and October 1648 that ended the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War, contained a provision that all prisoners should be released without ransom. This is generally considered to mark the point where captured enemy combatants would be reasonably treated before being released at the end of the conflict or under a parole not to take up arms. The practice of paroling enemy combatants had begun thousands of
Kettle War the economy of the northern Netherlands (namely Amsterdam), but the southern cities were dislodged from their important trading position. The closure of the Scheldt was confirmed by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, to which the Spanish agreed. After the War of the Spanish Succession, the Spanish Netherlands had been ceded to Austria by the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714. Since Europe's "Diplomatic Revolution" of 1756, Austria, and thus the Austrian Netherlands, had been in an alliance with France. Prussia, France's former ally, entered into an alliance with Britain. The change, sensational at the time, made nonsense of all the