Such is the stuff of the State, for without this principle it ceases to be State. The towns were besieged, stormed, and sacked, their inhabitants decimated or deported. The State in the end wins total victory. Their populations were decimated or deported, the State and Church took over their wealth. Even the roads which had hitherto linked these cities became impassable in the seventeenth century.
State is synonymous with war.
Wars devastated Europe and managed to finish off the towns which the State had not yet directly destroyed. Historians are unanimous in declaring that extreme poverty exists everywhere. In Russia it was the nascent State of the Romanovs that introduced serfdom and soon gave it the characteristics of slavery. The time of troubles in Russia at the beginning of the seventeenth century, represent a similar movement, directed against serfdom and the State but without a religious basis.