A while back in my video on Korean, I said that Hangul was invented by “the emperor
himself, Seijong the Great.”
As many people have since pointed out, however, Seijong was not an emperor.
He was a king.
No one calls him an emperor and I shouldn’t have either.
But that got me thinking: how exactly do you tell whether someone is a king or an emperor?
Like, I think we all think of different groups of people when I say these words.
But these people and the countries they were in charge of seem pretty similar to me.
Maybe the difference is that kings have kingdoms while emperors have empires, and a kingdom
is a small nation-state while an empire is a much bigger, multi-national entity.
And that fits most of the time.
But by that logic modern Russia should be called an empire, sense both it’s huge and
contains a lot of very different cultural groups, while the Holy Roman Empire and they
Byzantine Empire should be called kingdoms because of how comparatively small homogeneous
they were, but no one ever does either of those things.
The truth is, which countries we call empires and which we call kingdoms is really arbitrary,
and tied up in what I think is some very interesting history.
Like a lot of history stories, this one starts with the Romans.
Latin, like most languages, had a word for rulers that held all the power and passed
it down to their kids.
We call them “kings,” their word was “rex”.
But for the first huge chunk of their history the Romans defined themselves largely by the
fact that they didn’t have one.
In Rome alone did the people make sure that no one person ever got too much power.
So when eventually one person got to much power, he knew that he at least needed to
pretend he wasn’t a king, or else he’d get stabbed twenty three times.
The result of this was that, even though all the power in Rome was concentrated in the
hands of one person and even though he usually passed this position on to his relatives,
they never called this person a king.
Either they were called “commander,” in reference to their position in charge of the
military, which in latin was “imperator,” or they were called “Caesar,” which was
just their last name.
Like, sense all of the first few of them were related they all had the same last name, so
people started using that name to refer to the office itself.
After 476 when Rome lost control over the part of Rome that had Rome in it, for more
than three hundred years the only people who called themselves “imperator” or “caesar”
were the people we now call the Byzantines.
After all, they saw themselves as Roman and these titles had basically come to mean “the
person in charge of Rome.”
But around the same time these titles also became more than that.
Rome had been the biggest and most powerful country in the region by a lot for a long
time, so imperator and caesar started meaning “person even more powerful than a king,”
and as such Europeans started using them to refer to people outside of Europe who ruled
particularly big and powerful countries.
When referring to people within Europe it meant “leader of Rome,” and when referring
to people outside of Europe it meant “as important for those people as the leaders
of Rome are for us.”
Because of this association with Rome, and the ridiculous amount of prestige that comes
with Rome, a lot of rulers in Europe over time have adopted one or both of these titles.
The leaders of the Ottomans called themselves “kaisar-i-rum” when they replaced the
Byzantines, the implication being that they were the new Byzantine Empire.
To which the Russians responded “no, WE’RE the new Byzantines!” and then they started
calling their leaders “Caesar” or “Tzar” for short.
In western Europe a Germanic king, who in English we call “Charlemagne,” claimed
to lead the successor to the Western Roman Empire.
He took both these titles, but speakers of German gradually stopped using the word “imperator”
as much, favoring “caesar” instead, and the leaders of Germany kept calling themselves
that up until World War One, which is why in English we called this guy the kaiser.
Basically the reverse happened in English.
“imperator” became our modern word “emperor,” while “caesar” we reserved for ancient
Romans who were actually members of that family.
We started pronouncing it “Caesar,” though, because French.
That was the status quo for a few hundred years, until Napoleon declared himself “Emperor
of the French,” and once he started doing it everyone started doing it!
The Austrians started calling themselves “Kaiser von Österreich,” the Queen of England decided
she was also the “Empress of India,” and the regent of Brazil declared independence
from Portugal and took the title “imperador do brasil.”
All this had the effect of taking a way a lot of that “successor to Rome” implication
that these words used to have.
After the World War 2 the world was dominated by two main ideologies: liberal democracy
and communism, and at least in theory neither ideology was particularly fond of the idea
of one person having all the power, so to today almost no one calls themselves “emperor”.
But we still call lots of historical entities “empires” and the people in charge of
them “emperors.”
Usually we do this either when they called themselves “imperator” or “caesar”
or words derived from them, or when it’s just a really big country, although there
are some weird exceptions.
But even if all of this put together makes the distinction between king and emperor seem
kind of arbitrary, everyone still just goes along with it because if everyone calls someone
by one of term and you use the other you wind up looking kinda stupid.
Trust me, I learned the hard way.
It feels wrong to have the full credits with a song for shorter videos but people got mad
at me last time when I didn’t put the patrons on the screen for very long so I don’t know
what to do here!