Few historical documents have been credited with as much as these treaties. In international relations theory, Westphalia routinely appears as the origin of the sovereign state system, the moment when territorial sovereignty, non-interference and the modern states system were established, so that the whole post-1648 order is called Westphalian.
Historians who work on the actual treaties have been dismantling this for some time. The texts do not proclaim sovereignty as a principle. They confirm the empire's constitutional structure rather than abolishing it, leaving the imperial estates with rights that fall well short of independent statehood and leaving imperial institutions in place. The provisions on religion are explicitly interference in the internal arrangements of member territories, guaranteed by foreign powers. The word sovereignty appears in a narrower and more technical sense than the theory requires.
The myth appears to have been assembled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by writers looking for a founding moment for the system they inhabited, and it has been repeated in textbooks ever since with little reference to the documents.
The atlas records the settlement rather than the legend, and flags the legend, because the same pattern recurs in this atlas: a real event acquires a later significance that becomes better known than the event, and the correction never travels as fast as the story.