 Pufendorf’s natural law thinking developed in close interaction with his views on other subjects such as history, religion, and international relations; that is, his roles as academic philosopher, court historian, and political apologist were only formally and not intellectually distinct (Seidler 2015). This is as evident in the seminal reflections of his early Collegium Anthologicum lectures (in KVS 1995e, pp. 2–86) as it is in his later works. Thus, the 1667 treatise on the Holy Roman Empire (Monz.) not only studied its concrete history and institutions but also examined the importance of sovereignty and state form, the tension between civil and ecclesiastical authority, and the challenge of foreign relations that emerged from these. Pufendorf’s so-called works on religion (Habitu; Feciale; Einl. [1691b, 1714, 1839]) engaged the same topics, as well as associated questions about religious unification and toleration, in the context of the early modern confessional state (Parkin and Stanton 2013; Döring 1998; Zurbuchen 1999, 1996, 1991; Hüning 2002b). Even Pufendorf’s concretely situated and apparently partisan defenses of the Swedish interest (Discussio, Occas.) – which were sometimes regarded as merely contingent or opportunistic productions – exhibit the challenge (for particular sovereigns and their historians) of applying the natural law’s general injunctions to specific historical circumstances. Most obviously, perhaps, his explicitly historical works – including the long accounts of Sweden (Gust. Ad., C. Gust.) and of Brandenburg (Fr. Wilh., Pufendorf 1784) that so distinguished him, but also his famous Introductions (Einl. 1682, 1686b) – give substance to and thus support his philosophical analysis of the state (Seidler 1996 and 1997, Piirimäe 2008, Dufour 1991c, Krawczuk 2014). To be sure, the focus here is mainly on the external relations and negotiations of particular states. But sovereigns must conduct these as judiciously and effectively as their states’ internal affairs, for it is useless to have internal peace if a state is externally weak (DJN VII.4.5). The two dimensions of statecraft are clearly linked throughout Pufendorf’s opus, which urges sovereigns (and those who create them) to consult both long- and short-term interests of states, distinguishing the real from the merely apparent ones (Einl., Preface, 2013), both to avoid the (re)emergence of an internal or external state of nature and, more generally, to satisfy the natural law’s injunction to further sociality among humans.