Official religion in 1544

Settlement religion is reconstructed from the Institute of European History (IEG) maps of the legally recognized religion of European territories in 1500 and 1555. This models public law and institutions, not personal belief.

• IEG map collection: https://www.ieg-maps.uni-mainz.de/mapsp/mapconfession.htm
• Source rights statement: © IEG Mainz / Andreas Kunz. The source page does not state an open-data license; only the project's coarse derived intermediate is checked in.
• Reference maps: IEG_Europe_1500_religion.gif and IEG_Europe_1555_religion.pdf.
• Game year: 1544.

The published maps are illustrative rasters without a machine-readable geographic boundary layer. The checked-in assets/world-data/ieg-religion-1544.csv is therefore a deliberately coarse, human-curated intermediate between the two maps. Each row is a named bounding region with an explicit unique priority; lower numbers are evaluated first, so small territories override broad ones even if the file is reordered. The shapes are gameplay priors and do not claim to reproduce historical borders exactly.

Settlements outside the curated regions receive a complete plausible fallback: Roman Catholic in the general Viabundus coverage and Eastern Orthodox in the far-eastern Ruthenian portion. No canonical record stores an unknown religion. The compiler refuses to use this fixed intermediate for a year other than 1544.

Imported model

Canonical data distinguishes:

• an established official religion;
• parity, where two recognized western confessions have equal legal status;
• multi-confessional status, where multiple confessions are legally present;
• religion determined at the municipal level.

The supported denominations are Roman Catholic, Lutheran (the IEG Wittenberg Reformation category), Reformed, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, and Islamic. Pair arrangements carry a pair-specific church enum, so the settlement's current single church cannot name a denomination outside the legal arrangement. The existing church/priest gameplay identifier is derived from that typed denomination during database import rather than supplied as a second potentially contradictory field.

The compiler reports the number of curated regions, settlement samples, and fallback samples. --religion-regions can point to another intermediate using the same checked CSV boundary.

The checked intermediate was audited against all 6,041 Viabundus settlements active in 1544. Its 13 explicit regions omit places for which the historical source identifies only generic Protestantism, allowing denomination inference to resolve those settlements without creating a catch-all canonical religion. Remaining unmatched settlements use the Roman Catholic fallback. The Upper Rhine multi-confessional approximation retains its specific priority over the broader Hessian region.

just verify-religion validates the committed file's fixed size, SHA-256, exact column order, ascending unique priorities, coordinate bounds, statuses, and 13-row revision. plan-religion reports that identity. init-religion always refuses so the rights-reserved GIF/PDF source images are never downloaded or mirrored.