Static spatial data on territories of the Holy Roman Empire: Automatically extracted

Abstract

This data set captures static spatial and non-spatial aspects of territories of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) in 16th century Europe. Each line in the data files corresponds to a territory and each column to an attribute. Spatial attributes are the geo-coordinates of the perimeter of the territories. This allows us to map territories on a map, compute neighbourhood relations and surface areas. Non-spatial attributes include the foundation year of the territory or its official denomination (e.g., Lutheran). This data set was automatically generated based on a modern political map of the HRE around 1400 and the Wikipedia pages of HRE territories. A sister data set exists with spatio-temporal attributes of territories that were manually extracted (doi=10.3929/ethz-b-000472583).