The Dragon Wars - A Humanoid Coup

The Conflict

Outcome

The short-term effects of the Dragon Wars was that humanoid beings were able to take the land they wanted to settle on; the dragons, once defeated, simply flew or swam away.

Aftermath

The aftermath has been harder to puzzle out from what might be bad luck. The lands that the humanoid beings won, and used as farming land, turned from fertile to barren within a two year period (there are thoughts that because the dragons left, they took their natural magic with them - some people even say that without dragon dung, the land became worthless). Because the farmers didn't have the food necessary to live off of the land, they turned to attacking the caravans that traveled through the area and ambushing them. Within a generation, farmers became bandits and the bandits started to make their way to the sea, where once they reached the coast, they started to steal ships and become pirates.
Dragons also never came back to the area, which meant that the predators that they kept down continued to rise in number and eat most of the herbivores that lived in the area. In turn, this meant that treacherous thorns and mallow maize overgrew in the area and were a danger to all around. This meant that the area began to be a "travel only" section, which meant that caravans passed through but didn't stop. 
Today, the area isn't used for much of anything due to the amount of painful plant life that lives there and is too expensive to remove.

Historical Significance

In Literature

There are many books written from the humanoids' point of view during the war, but very few from the dragons' point of view because a) they left the area, b) they don't want to talk about how they were defeated by an inferior species, and c) humanoids are crunchy and taste good with sauce. The number of fiction books outnumber the reference books about five to one, and this is the war most plays commonly refer to.