War of the Reunions well as the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 (which ended the Thirty Years War), ceded a number of towns to France. By tradition, when a town changed hands, so did the surrounding rural areas, which provided it with food and other such supplies. Often, the borders of these dependent regions were ill-defined. Thus, Louis and his court, from 1670, introduced several Chambers of Reunion to investigate whether France had been granted all the territory that it had been owed. The Chambers of Reunion, loyal to the king, ruled, after a review of conflicting medieval documents, that a number of outlying
Piracy in the Caribbean problems at home to turn much attention to their New World colonies. The non-Spanish colonies were growing and expanding across the Caribbean, fueled by a great increase in immigration as people fled from the chaos and lack of economic opportunity in Europe. While most of these new immigrants settled into the West Indies' expanding plantation economy, others took to the life of the buccaneer. Meanwhile, the Dutch, at last independent of Spain when the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia ended their own Eighty Years War (1568–1648) with the Habsburgs, made a fortune carrying the European trade goods needed by these new