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Emperor

Type of monarch

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The 126th Emperor Naruhito and the Empress Masako , taken on 15 May 2019.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan · CC BY 4.0

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Both emperors and kings are monarchs or sovereigns, both emperor and empress are considered monarchical titles. In as much as there is a strict definition of emperor, it is that an emperor has no relations implying the superiority of any other ruler and typically rules over more than one nation. Therefore, a king might be obliged to pay tribute to another ruler, or be restrained in his actions in some unequal fashion, but an emperor should in theory be completely free of such restraints. However, monarchs heading empires have not always used the title in all contexts—the British sovereign did not assume the title Empress of the British Empire even during the incorporation of India, though she was declared Empress of India.

In Western Europe, the title of Emperor was used exclusively by the Holy Roman Emperor, whose imperial authority was derived from the concept of translatio imperii, i.e., they claimed succession to the authority of the Roman emperors, thus linking themselves to Roman institutions and traditions as part of state ideology. Although initially ruling much of Central Europe and northern Italy, by the 19th century, the emperor exercised little power beyond the German-speaking states.

Although technically an elective title, by the late 16th century, the imperial title had in practice come to be inherited by the Habsburg Archdukes of Austria and, following the Thirty Years' War, their control over the states (outside the Habsburg monarchy, i.e. Austria, Bohemia and various territories outside the empire) had become nearly non-existent. However, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of the French in 1804 and was shortly followed by Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, who declared himself Emperor of Austria in the same year. The position of Holy Roman Emperor nonetheless continued until Francis II abdicated that position in 1806. In Eastern Europe, the monarchs of Russia also used translatio imperii to wield imperial authority as successors to the Eastern Roman Empire. Their status was officially recognised by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1514, although not officially used by the Russian monarchs until 1547. However, the Russian emperors are better known by their Russian-language title of Tsar even after Peter the Great adopted the title of Emperor of All Russia in 1721.

Historians have liberally used "emperor" and "empire" anachronistically and out of its Roman and European context to describe any large state from the past or the present. Some titles are considered equivalent to "emperor" or are translated as "emperor". Examples of that are Roman emperors' titles, King of Kings, Khalifa, Huangdi, Cakravartin, Great Khan, Aztec monarchs' title, Inca monarchs' title, etc. Sometimes this reference has even extended to non-monarchically ruled states and their spheres of influence, such as the Athenian Empire of the late 5th century BC, the Angevin Empire of the Plantagenets and the Soviet and US "empires" of the Cold War era. However, such "empires" did not need to be headed by an "emperor". "Empire" became identified instead with vast territorial holdings rather than the title of its ruler by the mid-18th century.

For purposes of protocol, the size and scope of a kingdom or empire may determine precedence in international diplomatic relations, but currently, precedence among heads of state who are sovereigns—whether they be kings, queens, emperors, empresses, princes, princesses and presidents may be determined by the size and scope or time that each one has been continuously in office. Outside the European context, "emperor" was the translation given to holders of titles who were accorded the same precedence as European emperors in diplomatic terms. In reciprocity, these rulers might accredit equal titles in their native languages to their European peers. Through centuries of international convention, this has become the dominant rule to identifying an emperor in the modern era.

Roman Empire

Classical Antiquity

When Republican Rome turned into a de facto monarchy in the second half of the 1st century BC, at first there was no name for the title of the new type of monarch. Ancient Romans abhorred the name Rex ("king"), and it was critical to the political order to maintain the forms and pretences of republican rule. Julius Caesar had been Dictator, an acknowledged and traditional office in Republican Rome. Caesar was not the first to hold it, but following his assassination the term was abhorred in Rome.

Augustus, considered the first Roman emperor, established his hegemony by collecting on himself offices, titles, and honours of Republican Rome that had traditionally been distributed to different people who held these roles for a specific time period, often with a colleague. In the process, Augustus concentrated what had been distributed power in one man, all at once, and in practice without a time limit (the powers with nominal time limits were renewed when they lapsed). One of these offices was princeps senatus, ("first man of the Senate") and became changed into Augustus' chief honorific, princeps civitatis ("first citizen") from which the modern English word and title prince is descended as for the term premier. The first period of the Roman Empire, from 27 BC to AD 284, is called the principate for this reason. However, it was the informal descriptive of Imperator ("commander") that became the title increasingly favoured by his successors. Previously bestowed on high officials and military commanders who had imperium, Augustus reserved it exclusively to himself as the ultimate holder of all imperium. (Imperium is Latin for the authority to command, one of a various types of authority delineated in Roman political thought.)

Beginning with Augustus, Imperator appeared in the title of all Roman monarchs through the extinction of the Empire in 1453. After the reign of Augustus' immediate successor Tiberius, being proclaimed imperator was transformed into the act of accession to the head of state. Other honorifics used by the Roman emperors have also come to be synonyms for Emperor:

  • Caesar Latin: (as, for example, in Suetonius' Twelve Caesars). This tradition continued in many languages: in German it became "Kaiser"; in certain Slavic languages it became "Tsar"; in Hungarian it became "Császár", and several more variants. The name derived from Julius Caesar's cognomen "Caesar": this cognomen was adopted by all Roman emperors, exclusively by the ruling monarch after the Julio-Claudian dynasty had died out. In this tradition Julius Caesar is sometimes described as the first Caesar/emperor (following Suetonius). This is one of the most enduring titles: Caesar and its transliterations appeared in every year from the time of Caesar Augustus to the modern era.
  • Augustus was the honorific first bestowed on Emperor Augustus: on his death it became an official title of his successor and all Roman emperors after him added it to their name. Although it had a high symbolic value, something like "elevated" or "sublime", it was generally not used to indicate the office of Emperor itself. Exceptions include the title of the Augustan History, a semi-historical collection of emperors' biographies of the 2nd and 3rd century. This title also proved very enduring: after the fall of the Roman Empire, the title would be incorporated into the style of the Holy Roman Emperor, a precedent set by Charlemagne, and its Greek translation Sebastos continued to be used in the Byzantine Empire until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, although it gradually lost its imperial exclusivity. Augustus had (by his last will) granted the feminine form of this honorific (Augusta) to his wife. Since there was no "title" of Empress(-consort) whatsoever, women of the reigning dynasty sought to be granted this honorific, as the highest attainable goal. Few were however granted the title, and it was certainly not a rule that all wives of reigning emperors would receive it.
  • Imperator (as, for example, in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia). In the Roman Republic Imperator meant "(military) commander". In the late Republic, as in the early years of the new monarchy, Imperator was a title granted to Roman generals by their troops and the Roman Senate after a great victory, roughly comparable to field marshal (head or commander of the entire army). For example, in AD 15 Germanicus was proclaimed Imperator during the reign of his adoptive father Tiberius. Soon thereafter "Imperator" became however a title reserved exclusively for the ruling monarch. This led to "Emperor" in English and, among other examples, "Empereur" in French and "Mbreti" in Albanian. The Latin feminine form Imperatrix only developed after "Imperator" had taken on the connotation of "Emperor".
  • Autokrator (Αὐτοκράτωρ) or Basileus (βασιλεύς): although the Greeks used equivalents of "Caesar" (Καῖσαρ, Kaisar) and "Augustus" (in two forms: transliterated as Αὔγουστος, Augoustos or translated as Σεβαστός, Sebastos) these were rather used as part of the name of the emperor than as an indication of the office. Instead of developing a new name for the new type of monarchy, they used αὐτοκράτωρ (autokratōr, only partly overlapping with the modern understanding of "autocrat") or βασιλεύς (basileus, until then the usual name for "sovereign"). Autokratōr was essentially used as a translation of the Latin Imperator in Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire, but also here there is only partial overlap between the meaning of the original Greek and Latin concepts. For the Greeks Autokratōr was not a military title, and was closer to the Latin dictator concept ("the one with unlimited power"), before it came to mean Emperor. Basileus appears not to have been used exclusively in the meaning of "emperor" (and specifically, the Roman/Byzantine emperor) before the 7th century, although it was a standard informal designation of the emperor in the Greek-speaking East. The title was later applied by the rulers of various Eastern Orthodox countries claiming to be the successors of Rome/Byzantium, such as Georgia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia.

After the turbulent Year of the Four Emperors in 69, the Flavian dynasty reigned for three decades. The succeeding Nervan-Antonian dynasty, ruling for most of the 2nd century, stabilised the empire. This epoch became known as the era of the Five Good Emperors, and was followed by the short-lived Severan dynasty.

During the Crisis of the 3rd century, barracks emperors succeeded one another at short intervals. Three short lived secessionist attempts had their own emperors: the Gallic Empire, the Britannic Empire, and the Palmyrene Empire though the latter used rex more regularly.

The Principate (27 BC – 284 AD) period was succeeded by what is known as the Dominate (284 AD – 527 AD), during which Emperor Diocletian tried to put the empire on a more formal footing. Diocletian sought to address the challenges of the Empire's now vast geography and the instability caused by the informality of succession by the creation of co-emperors and junior emperors. At one point, there were as many as five sharers of the imperium (see: Tetrarchy). In 325 AD Constantine I defeated his rivals and restored single emperor rule, but following his death the empire was divided among his sons. For a time the concept was of one empire ruled by multiple emperors with varying territory under their control, however following the death of Theodosius I the rule was divided between his two sons and increasingly became separate entities. The areas administered from Rome are referred to by historians the Western Roman Empire and those under the immediate authority of Constantinople called the Eastern Roman Empire or (after the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 AD) the Later Roman or Byzantine Empire. The subdivisions and co-emperor system were formally abolished by Emperor Zeno in 480 AD following the death of Julius Nepos last Western Emperor and the ascension of Odoacer as the de facto King of Italy in 476 AD.

Byzantine period

Before the 4th Crusade

Historians generally refer to the continuing Roman Empire in the east as the Byzantine Empire after Byzantium, the original name of the town that Constantine I would elevate to the Imperial capital as New Rome in AD 330. (The city is more commonly called Constantinople and is today named Istanbul). Although the empire was again subdivided and a co-emperor sent to Italy at the end of the fourth century, the office became unitary again only 95 years later at the request of the Roman Senate and following the death of Julius Nepos, last Western Emperor. This change was a recognition of the reality that little remained of Imperial authority in the areas that had been the Western Empire, with even Rome and Italy itself now ruled by the essentially autonomous Odoacer.

These Later Roman "Byzantine" emperors completed the transition from the idea of the emperor as a semi-republican official to the emperor as an absolute monarch. Of particular note was the translation of the Latin Imperator into the Greek Basileus, after Emperor Heraclius changed the official language of the empire from Latin to Greek in AD 620. Basileus, a title which had long been used for Alexander the Great was already in common usage as the Greek word for the Roman emperor, but its definition and sense was "King" in Greek, essentially equivalent with the Latin Rex. Byzantine period emperors also used the Greek word "autokrator", meaning "one who rules himself", or "monarch", which was traditionally used by Greek writers to translate the Latin dictator. Essentially, the Greek language did not incorporate the nuances of the Ancient Roman concepts that distinguished imperium from other forms of political power.

In general usage, the Byzantine imperial title evolved from simply "emperor" (basileus) to "emperor of the Romans" (basileus tōn Rōmaiōn) in the 9th century, to "emperor and autocrat of the Romans" (basileus kai autokratōr tōn Rōmaiōn) in the 10th. In fact, none of these (and other) additional epithets and titles had ever been completely discarded.

One important distinction between the post Constantine I (reigned AD 306–337) emperors and their pagan predecessors was cesaropapism, the assertion that the emperor (or other head of state) is also the head of the Church. Although this principle was held by all emperors after Constantine, it met with increasing resistance and ultimately rejection by bishops in the west after the effective end of Imperial power there. This concept became a key element of the meaning of "emperor" in the Byzantine and Orthodox East, but went out of favour in the west with the rise of Roman Catholicism.

The Byzantine Empire also produced three women who effectively governed the state: the Empress Irene and the Empresses Zoe and Theodora.

Latin emperors

In 1204 Constantinople fell to the Venetians and the Franks in the Fourth Crusade. Following the sacking of the city, the conquerors declared a new "Empire of Romania", known to historians as the Latin Empire of Constantinople, installing Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders, as Emperor. However, Byzantine resistance to the new empire meant that it was in constant struggle to establish itself. Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos succeeded in recapturing Constantinople in 1261. The Principality of Achaea, a vassal state the empire had created in Morea (Greece) intermittently continued to recognise the authority of the crusader emperors for another half century. Pretenders to the title continued among the European nobility until circa 1383.

After the 4th Crusade

With Constantinople occupied, claimants to the imperial succession styled themselves as emperor in the chief centres of resistance: The Laskarid dynasty in the Empire of Nicaea, the Komnenid dynasty in the Empire of Trebizond and the Doukid dynasty in the Despotate of Epirus. In 1248, Epirus recognised the Nicaean emperors, who subsequently recaptured Constantinople in 1261. The Trapezuntine emperor formally submitted in Constantinople in 1281, but frequently flouted convention by styling themselves emperor back in Trebizond thereafter.

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