I have a question about the union of countries or in my case empires. The Iberian Union joined the Spanish and Portuguese empires for 60 years. Would you create a new relation called the Iberian Empire or would you give all the colonies to Spain since they were the dominant power in the relationship, or would you just keep them separated, as they kept their respective colonies after the union fell apart. I have the same question regarding the Kalmar Union and the Dutch when they were under the rule of the Spanish.
I’m by no means an expert on this period of history, but I was under the impression that personal unions are typically depicted as separate empires and separate countries. Even today, the Commonwealth is a personal union, and Andorra is technically in a personal union with France.
That said, it probably hasn’t always been very coherent and consistent throughout history. We currently exclude Scotland from the English Empire before 1707, even though Scotland was in a personal union with England at the time. The Papal States were in some ways a personal union, but I haven’t come across a map that doesn’t generalize them as a single polity. At least we should be consistent within a given chronology.
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At first, this reminds me of type=person in OSM. But that’s for individual humans only, not the “office-holder”.
type=treaty is for treaties. Better keep it precise.
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To that point, to the extent that we model any membership-based structure (such as an international treaty organization), we should model it as a superrelation rather than a massive boundary, for simplicity.
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Ok, thanks for the answers. Unions should stay separated, but if an empire conquers another empire, then I believe they should get their territories.
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