Petrus Noë was born a good year after Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and he lived through her entire reign. In 1718, the year of his birth, famine ravaged much of Europe as frost killed crops, fruit trees and domestic fowl as far south as the Mediterranian Coast.

In 1711 the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I dies of smallpox. He is succeeded by his 26 year old brother who fights to restore the empire of his Hapsburg ancestor Charles V in the War of the Spanish Succession.

In 1715 France's Louis XIV, the Sun King, dies four days short of his 77th birthday. He is succeeded by his 5-year old grandson who will reign as King Louis XV for almost 59 years.

The improved economic conditions of the second half of the 18th century, the fact that people married younger, healthier living and lower infant mortality contributed to a rapid increase in the population. Maria Theresa successfully encouraged agricultural production and industrial expansion and perhaps that is why so many more mouths to feed didn't mean more famine.

1776 was the year of the birth of the United States of America.

Petrus also saw the sweeping reforms of the go-ahead holy Roman emperor Joseph II, the eldest son of Maria Theresa who reigned from 1765 to 1790.  For instance his very unpopular decree to have all parish fairs on the same day.  Especially in Summer many people wanted to go to fairs in the neighbouring villages: for the overwhelming majority that was the only Sunday recreation there was to be had.

Petrus was a contemporary of great musical composers such as Antonio Vivaldi (1678 - 1741), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750), George Frederick Handel (1685 - 1759), Frans Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)  and of the influential philosophers François Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694 - 1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778).  The latter claimed that man was basically good but became corrupted by modern civilisation. Perhaps two hundred years later he would have repeated the same thing.  He also glorified virtue, work and family life.  He was the inspiration for the "Declaration of the Rights of Man".