Dead Empires

Europe's empires, kingdoms, principalities, and other vanished states have a bad habit of leaving paperwork behind. Liechtenstein exists because a noble family bought two patches of land in 1699 and 1712 to earn a seat in the Holy Roman Empire's parliament. German states are still paying churches over land seized in the Napoleonic era, and the Knights of Malta lost Malta in 1798 but still issue passports. Dead Empires traces the borders, titles, treaties, and administrative decisions that outlived the governments that made them. The empire may be gone, but somebody is inevitably still arguing about what it did.