 What features of Westphalia make it the origin of the sovereign states system? In fact, not all scholars agree that it deserves this status (see Krasner 1999). Nowhere in the settlement’s treaties is a sovereign states system or even the state as the reigning legitimate unit, prescribed. Certainly, Westphalia did not create a sovereign states system ex nihilo, for components of the system had been accumulating for centuries up to the settlement; afterwards, some medieval anomalies persisted. In two broad respects, though, in both legal prerogatives and practical powers, the system of sovereign states triumphed. First, states emerged as virtually the sole form of substantive constitutional authority in Europe, their authority no longer seriously challenged by the Holy Roman Empire. The Netherlands and Switzerland gained uncontested sovereignty, the German states of the Holy Roman Empire accrued the right to ally outside the empire, while both the diplomatic communications and foreign policy designs of contemporary great powers revealed a common understanding of a system of sovereign states. The temporal powers of the Church were also curtailed to the point that they no longer challenged any state’s sovereignty. In reaction, Pope Innocent X condemned the treaties of the peace as “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time” (quoted in Maland 1966, 16).