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.