From the late Middle Ages I move to seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, honor became an increasingly powerful motive, if not a way of life for much the European elite. The quest for gloire was the dominant dynastic goal, and found expression in expansion and war, although economic and security considerations were not insignificant. The period between Westphalia and the French Revolution offers insights into how concern for honor can shape foreign policy and the conduct of war, and also how it interacts with other motives to produce complex, and at times contradictory, patterns of behavior. The quest for gloire was limited to the great powers whose monarchs waged war for largely personal ends. War also served to find a new basis for legitimizing dynastic rule in an era when the commercial classes were becoming more important and were increasingly the arbiters of taste. Europe included Protestant and Catholic states and their dependencies stretching from Ireland to Russia, and non-Christian powers, most notably the Ottoman Empire, played an important if unofficial role in the political system they constituted.