alternatehistory.com

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?
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