The political violence that characterised mid-seventeenth-century Italy had subsided in the north by the 1690s, a process that can be traced in the falling homicide rate. But the return of large-scale warfare to the peninsula in the 1690s cautions against any simplistic claims regarding the disciplining of the aristocracy. However, in regions where the state’s legitimacy remained weak assassination survived. The mid-century convulsions that shook the Spanish Empire cast a long shadow. Historians have long dismissed ideas of Spanish ‘decline’. The notion of ‘decline’ is a moral category and the empire proved remarkably resilient in its Mediterranean heartland. Rather, the problem of violence in the Mezzogiorno was rooted in politics. The weak legitimacy of the state required the use of fear and violence, which in turn bred contempt for and distrust of the law. The decline of vendetta practices in northern Italy in the first half of the eighteenth century is well attested. It was a consequence of political and social processes which transformed the social elite and its relationship to authority in the decades around 1700. It was during the eighteenth century that a clear distinction between a pacified north and a south characterised by stubbornly high levels of interpersonal violence first became apparent. Vendetta became a regional problem.