Borders and the HRE

It's a cartographer's worst nightmare: enclaves galore, seemingly nonsensical boundaries, not to mention the sheer number of principalities. If we were to build a strategically-sound sovereign country, we might point to one of those sovereigns within the HRE and say, "Here's how to NOT design good borders." And yet many of those states held their godawful borders for centuries. Just look at the prince-bishopric of Mainz: it had no large core territory, its capital was located in one of its smaller exclaves, and yet it held for centuries until the mediatization under Napoleon. How were this border gore made? What stopped princes from consolidating lands or trading them out for more strategic holdings? And how might the HRE look had these developments not occurred and each state had more consolidated lands?
 
There's a few things going on. First, for most of the period in question it's a mistake to think of HRE member estates as independent nations. While the HRE usually had a very weak central government, it was still a government of sorts. One of the perks of Imperial Immediacy was a claim on the Emperor's protection. The usual remedy if an HRE member estate suffered aggression was either direct military intervention by the Emperor or the proclamation of an Imperial Ban (a form of outlawry, removing the aggressor's Imperial protections unless and until he submitted). And with this kind of protection available, defensible borders are much less important: estates within more centralized countries like England or France tended to be at least as fragmented as HRE estates.

Small HRE states also tended to form alliances and leagues for mutual protection when threatened, especially during the periods when Imperial authority was weakest. And larger HRE states generally tended to look unkindly on the idea of their rivals gobbling up minor states as well, in a similar dynamic to how Luxembourg survived the 19th and 20th centuries as an independent nation.

It's also important to remember that for most of the HRE's lifetime, it required long, expensive sieges to capture a well-fortified city or castle. When wars are fought as series of sieges, messy borders are much less of a defensive handicap (especially if you have the right to move troops between your enclaves to relieve sieges) than they'd be in the 19th and 20th centuries.
 
This is your opinion on the idea of the map of the empire having an ugly look. Rather, I find it attractive the idea of the complexity and plethora of principalities within the Holy Roman Empire.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
This whole thread is basically: "Waaaahhhh, I don't like this, it's so stupid and not strategically sound.... how can it be that it actually lasted so long and worked so well?!" ;)

It worked so well because it wasn't stupid, it actually was quite sound, it existed in a completely different context than that of the modern Westphalian system of states and thus had different needs and functions, and also because people don't actually make borders based on what some people think looks pretty on a map.

P.S. Bordergore is awesome. Bordergore is love. Bordergore is life. Learn to love the bordergore, @Daedalus!
 
What stopped princes from consolidating lands or trading them out for more strategic holdings?
There are several reasons why:
1. Inheritance - it's the lord's land and his rights to it stretch back generations, maybe centuries.
2. Money - why trade a valuable exclave for a worthless land on your border?
3. No need - for a large portion of the HRE's history, Imperial lords did not have to shore up their borders against each other, because they were not fighting each other.

It's also important to remember that for most of the HRE's lifetime, it required long, expensive sieges to capture a well-fortified city or castle. When wars are fought as series of sieges, messy borders are much less of a defensive handicap (especially if you have the right to move troops between your enclaves to relieve sieges) than they'd be in the 19th and 20th centuries.
That's true. In the modern day, occupied territory usually means victory. In the Middle Ages, if one occupied all the land but didn't take the castle, no victory for them.
 
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@Skallagrim

Honestly, I wish there was a modern nation like this. Like I said before, the Middle East should have these patchwork of municipalities, city-states, tribes, and polities. True border gore are those cookie-cutter, manufactured borders of Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia. This (the HRE's borders) is just pleasant to look at.
 
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