In Russia, a new phase began with the defeat of Sweden at Poltava in 1709. The changes made by Peter the Great before that battle had been tentative and makeshift, dictated mostly by the immediate needs of war. When his victory at Poltava had freed Russia from the threat of invasion, he launched a programme of premeditated and consistent reforms, from which all his most enduring achievements emerged.

In the days of Peter the Great the chief source of Russia's wealth was her forests. The fertile steppe land of the south had not yet been brought under the plough. The spearhead of the southward colonisation movement was formed by the Don Cossacks, most of them deserters from the army, dissenters escaping persecution, or runaway peasants, all of whom despised the plough and lived a life of plunder along the rivers. In central Muscovy, which was the main agricultural area of Russia, some peasants continued the practice of burning tracts of forest, sowing their crops on the ashen soil for thirty to forty years and then moving off to repeat the process elsewhere. Even where the population was more permanent the peasants were reluctant to enrich the soil because their strips of land were redistributed every seven to twelve years. Most peasants used a light wooden plough with an iron share, but some still preferred a primitive hook plough that had been used in Russia for 700 years. Crops were harvested with the sickle in spite of Peter's efforts to introduce the scythe. Rye was the main crop in central Russia, but Peter induced the Baltic landowners to produce flax and hemp for export.

In 1713 and 1714 eleven separate treaties of peace almost brought the War of the Spanish Succession to an end. They left the Emperor and the king of Spain still at war, but large-scale hostilities were over and most of the belligerents had been able to reach a satisfactory settlement. The Spanish possessions were divided. Philip V, the grandson of Louis XIV, was recognised as king of Spain in spite of the disapproval of the Protestant Powers and of the Emperor; but he had to resign his claims to the throne of France, and he was not allowed to inherit the empire of Charles II in its entirety. Philip V received Spain and Spanish America, but the Netherlands, Milan, Naples, Mantua, Sardinia and the Spanish ports in Tuscany went to the Emperor Charles VI. Sicily went for a few years to the duke of Savoy.

In addition many other problems besides the division of the territories of the Spanish Habsburgs were settled by the peace treaties of 1713–14. In the treaty concluded between England and France the claim of the Hanoverians to the throne of England was also recognised. Implicitly this gave recognition to the theory of civil contract, and this concept was given further validity by the provisions that the arrangements for the successions to the thrones of France and of Spain were to be officially registered by the Parlement and by the Cortes respectively. The French diplomats warned their English colleagues that such an attempt to regulate the succession was not valid in French law; that the right to rule was derived from God, and that, should the death of the infant French prince leave the throne vacant, Philip V could not be bound by his renunciation but must mount the throne to which God had called him; but they did, at last, accept the provisions in public law which professed to regulate the succession by man-made agreements.

After the long period of strife brought about by the Great Schism, the Church had at last become reunited. Rallying round Nicholas V (1449), it seemed as though, in a less troubled atmosphere, it would now pursue its unchanging ideal. There resounded once more the two words which symbolised its twin aspirations: at home, reform; abroad, crusade. Both were of pressing necessity. Perspicacious minds in every country were calling for a far-reaching reform of the Church and hoping —somewhat vaguely, it is true—for something of a return to the purity of earlier times. As far as the crusade against the Turks was concerned, events which moved daily more rapidly were enough to prove, even to the most indifferent, that it had become inescapably necessary. From then on, and for a long time to come, reform at home and crusade abroad were to occupy a prominent place in papal speeches—in speeches and bulls rather than in deeds.

Indeed, by the middle of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance was already to some extent bursting upon Italy, and the brilliance with which it was spreading was to dazzle the Papacy itself no less than the nations. Nicholas V, a first-rate scholar (he it was who founded the Vatican Library), was to be the first ‘Renaissance Pope’, and his decision to pull down the old basilica of Constantine and put up in its place a building in keeping with the spirit of the new age was a sign of his propensities and tastes. His decision, it should be added, has been criticised as an act of vandalism. The brilliance of the Renaissance was to be so intense as to blind the pope to every other ideal and lead the Holy See into a course where temporal glory and artistic splendour pushed spiritual matters into the background. Even an event as spectacular as the capture of Constantinople by the Turks (1453) could not rouse the already lukewarm fervour of the Christian world, nor did it effectively tear the Papacy away from preoccupations primarily concerned with earthly glories—or even, more sordidly, from mere family ambitions.