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Comment by voz_ | Hacker News Reader

The notion of a pre Westphalian nation is itself a little flawed, so definitionally it doesn’t even really make sense to pose the metric as such, let alone measure it.

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Well, there existed both nations and nation-states, fighting other nation states (often with conscious national sentiment and pride, like any modern era nation).

It was not all some blur, just because they didn't have modernity-style institutions.

But particularly the post-1648 notion of compact integrated territory just isn't there in premodern times except in a few exceptional cases, and population counting in the modern sense is bound up in that. But to take a particularly egregious case in the Holy Roman Empire a person might have three legal "existences" from the state's standpoint: one as a mediate vassal, one as an imperial knight, and one as a delegate of the church, and by the thought process of the HRE that was three different "persons" in one body.

I wonder if there's religious symbolism attached to this, i.e., I wonder if people in the HRE made an allusion between the trinity you mentioned and that of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

No, three is just an arbitrary number for their example. The point is not the exact number of roles but the fact that the basic legal unit is the relationship, not the person. For instance a prince-bishop might in principle be subject to an archbishop as a bishop, subject to the Emperor as an imperial prince, subject to the King of Bohemia (who was in turn subject to the Emperor) as the holder of a secular fief, and part of the Polish nobility, all at once.

yes this is true today - some researchers have identified the LEGAL definition of a person taking over from the biological definition of a person, in modern times. If you consider the realms of finance, things are definitely not consistent nor fully resolved.

Yeah, in retrospect I realized the three might be distracting but it was just the example I thought of at the moment. (It gets even worse if the guy also has burgher status in a free city!)

Not really. While there was a Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, it was neither an empire nor a national one; people identified much more with their local land or town than some nation. There was no Italy. Some nations currently residing in the former territory of Austria-Hungary did not exist at all - sure there were local languages and dialects and culture and so on, but there was no national identity of eg Slovaks.

It's hard to understand that from our perspective, but bringing the current notion of a nation or a nation state into 16th century is an anachronism.

Not a history buff, but it seems like the HRE is a particulary bad example. What about like the actual roman empire.

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