If you open your nearest historical atlas to the political map of Europe around 1500, several features will strike your eye at once. First, the large monochromas that represent more or less continuous sovereignty over extensive territories spiral around the map's periphery: the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish domains in the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean, France, England, Scotland, Denmark/Norway, Sweden, the lands of the Teutonic Order, Russia, Poland/Lithuania, Hungary. Within that ring the largest contiguous realms -Bohemia, Austria/Styria, mainland Venice, Savoy, Lorraine, the Burgundian Netherlands, Brandenburg, and (to stretch the word "realm") the Papal States and the Swiss Confederation -generally occupied less than a quarter of the terrain controlled by their peripheral neighbors. And in the arc from the Baltic's south shore over to Flanders and down to Florence swarmed hundreds of formally autonomous principalities, archduchies, bishoprics, free cities, and other statelets.
To be sure, a Habsburg-run Empire claimed suzerainty over many of these small domains, and the scattered territories ruled directly by the Habsburgs claimed a significant share of the European core. On the other hand, the nominal rulers of such medium-sized states as Brandenburg and the Burgundian Netherlands imposed their control only intermittently, weakly, and with the often-grudging mediation of regional oligarchs. In general, that map of 1500 shows us the outer two thirds of Europe in a ring of relatively large states, encircling a plethora of ministates and semistates. Taking as rules of thumb for statehood the rights to send ambassadors, maintain an army, police the territory, defend its boundaries, wage war, raise taxes, and treat with major states, in 1500 Europe contained on the order of five hundred states, most of them tiny.