Not surprisingly, the period from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to the French Revolution in 1789 affected the Order of Saint Augustine in the way that it affected the Catholic Church generally.
The period was a revolutionary time, with the intellect more than with weapons of war. It was the point in time during which historians assert that the Middle Ages abruptly ended.
The Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War and the Eighty Years’ War, and marked the end of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire as major political influences in Europe.
The encompassing medieval grip of religion on the mindset and politics of nations had effectively ended. Religious wars had been fought to a stalemate, and in the minds of many people religion itself was the loser.
And thus the modern era was born, and with it came the national governments of absolutist "enlightened despots" who wished to curb ecclesiastical power and control. Religious orders suffered the suppression of some of their monasteries, especially in the decades at the end of this period, and even more severely in the French Revolution and its aftermath.
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