Say a emperoror decides to visit a kingdom and orders the king to vacate their throne and allow the emperor to sit upon it. for as long as he was in the kingdom’s capital Would the king be bound to listen to his “king”? Could the emperor, as the king’s ruler, overrule any of the king’s rulings as per his wish? Say the king wanted to avoid war with a neighboring country but the emperor wanted it, who would the people listen to?
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I believe you have answered your own question without necessarily realising it. The hierarchy is the Emperor is in charge and the kings all do as the Emperor say. The Emperors word therefore is law to them and they need to do anything their boss says. The Kings are likely to be seen as a threat to any Emperor and could gather power revolt, so it is possible that once an Emperor is in power it would dissolve any previous kingdoms and say they all come under his role and all laws are to be agreed by him. I believe China used to do this – with the Emperor being the only one that can make laws
It’s a mix. Usually there were laws and rules governing said relationships, and an emperors power is also based on those relationships.
So could an emperor do whatever he wanted? In theory yes especially for a short time. But if he broke the rules and passed off the people he depends on for power, things could go poorly real fast. So would an emperor do that? Probably now.
Look at game of thrones. Could Joffrey murder Ned and others? Yes. Was it also a horrible idea resulting in his entirely family being wiped out and himself dying? Also yes
As is often the case in these things it depends. Feudal governments were not so much governed by law as by relations between people. An emperor got their position because the kings and princes under them allowed them to be emperor. In some cases there were actual elections while in others the emperor were depending on soldiers and taxes from their vassals. If a king wanted to break out of the empire the emperor usually needed help from the neighbouring kingdoms. But they might be worried that what upset the king who wanted to break free might happen to them as well.
So an emperor had to both be authoritative and show that he was in charge while also make sure that his orders was what the vassals wanted. Kind of like a boss telling you what to do and when to take your vacation knowing full well that he can not fire you or have you quit because he needs you to do the work.
There is no single answer to the question. The concept of a strict Emperor/King hierarchy is an oversimplification of history. In reality, the answer depends on which emperor, on which king, in what part of the world, and during what time period.
This is the kind of question civil wars are fought over. An emperor’s authority comes from the support of their vassals, so undermining and overstepping them would certainly lead to discontent and potentially destabilize the realm. On the other hand, an emperor acting in good faith with the support from the rest of his kings would have no problem steamrolling another king’s authority, especially if they were a threat to the internal stability or security of the empire.
A common vassalage contract might require the vassal to provide taxes and levies to his liege. If the king wants to avoid war he can certainly ask the emperor to reconsider, but at the end of the day refusing to submit the levies when the call to war goes out will cause problems later on.
From what I know there weren’t many states where emperors and kings co-existed like this. In the Holy Roman Empire the king and emperor was almost always the same person, because a person would be elected as King of the Romans by the aristocracy and if he had the means and good relations with the Papacy he would venture down to Rome to be crowned emperor.
There were some exceptions where a crowned emperor would ensure that his heir would be crowned king to ensure a smoother transition of power, or states like Bohemia which had a king, but this king would be subordinate to the King of the Romans if they were not the same person.
In these cases a king and his nobles essentially had written and unwritten contracts between them, as was normal in the feudal world. A contract could be something like “As the King of the Romans I hereby grant you the Duchy of Franconia, which shall be returned to me upon your death, you are allowed to mint coins, hold markets and dispense justice in your duchy and in return you are obligated to support me in times of war and provide X amounts of knights for Y amount of days per year of campaigning.” Both the king and his nobles had rights (that were not supposed to be violated but sometimes were) and obligations (that were sometimes fulfilled but not always) towards each other.
The king/emperor was not expected to or in the practice of barging into someone else’s kingdom/duchy and determining its domestic policy. If the King of the Romans had demanded to enter Prague, sit upon the King of Bohemia’s throne and run his kingdom as he saw fit it would have been seen as a gross overreach of power and he would have a rebellion on his hands.
Potentially yes, but the king might later choose to switch allegiance to another emperor
Essentially all this is politics. There’s nobody with higher authority to enforce the rules but if the person in charge pushes things too far he’ll lose the support of the vassal king.
If you’re Ghengis Khan, for example, you can probably get away with anything and destroy those who disobey. A less powerful emperor who needs the genuine support of the empire will tread more gently because anything that might humiliate the king might mean they take the other side if there’s an uprising.
All power grows form the barrel of a gun. Or the tip of a spear. There are definite historical examples of empires with multiple kingdoms under their rule who had great direct power over their subjects. There are other examples where the emperor was less strong than their underlings and had to play careful politics to stay in power. Smart leaders gathered soft and hard power and used it to control underlings. The less capable and the less lucky did not.
The problem is this was different for every empire, not all of which always had suzerain kingdoms, and for every emperor within an empire, and the balance of power could change during their reign. Broadly speaking a sub-king would have certain obligations to an over-king or emperor, say providing tribute and some armed forces, and certain rights ie they might be able to exercise justice over their own people or over the ruling people in their domain, at least in some cases, and make war independently within some limitations. I guess the norm would be that a suzerain can only make war independently with permission, the king would have to be a member of the royal house but the emperor’s support would be a deciding factor amongst competing claimants, they would have to provide some level of tribute and troops to the ruling power, and the ruling people would have some privileges.
If an emperor went beyond their accepted powers they risked rebelion, not just from the king they overuled but other subjects might see it as blooming tyranny and want to nip it in the bud; and if a king disobeyed the emperor, even in a case where they weren’t obliged to obedience, they risked being replaced or having their kingdom destroyed.
The balance of power was not always in favour of the emperor: there are plenty of cases where an emperor had less real power than one or more of his subjects, king or otherwise, and just who was over-lord to whom could be pretty complex, eg the Angevin Emperors owed featly to the King of France for their lands there, but were independently kings in England and Wales, with some degree of overlordship in the rest of the British Isles, and were often far more powerful than the King of France in real terms. The same could be said for kingdoms, with nobles quite often having more actual power and wealth than their king.
This could lead to powerful nobles or sub-kings in some way taking over the kingship or imperial power, ie Carolingian dynasty became ‘mayor of the palace’, a sort of major domo, and ‘prince and duke of the Franks’, which was closer to a military commander role at the time, then they made the role heriditary and, finally, dispensed with the Merovingian kings, eventually peaking with Charlemagne as ‘Emperor of the Romans’ before being replaced by the Capetians. In Japan Shoguns managed to superceed the Emperors at least twice, taking most of the actual power and reducing the emperors to more or less prisoners and puppets with only ceremonial powers, a common practice in many countries. In England the house of Godwin rose to power by good service to Canute the Great, well executed treachery and rebellion, and marrying Edith, a daughter of the house, to Edward the Confessor. When he died Harold was the most powerful man in England and he and his sister, the queen, said Edward chose him as successor on his deathbed so he became king despite the lack of legitimate claim.
A more legitimate method would be to simply marry one of your daughters to the mainline royal family, and support/control your grandchildren in the kingship, but this wasn’t necessarily so satisfactory from a dynastic point of view. A good example of this is Edward the Elder, King of the Anglo-Saxons, who was married and had 2 sons but was then remarried to a daughter, Ælfflæd, of a powerful Ealdorman, Æthelhelm. The sources aren’t reliable or complete but there’s a strong suspicion that Edward was forced to put aside his first wife and remarry by his family, in order to consolidate power, with her family pushing for her sons to gain the kingship, possibly by casting aspersions of illegitimacy over the older boys, and yet the eldest, Æthelstan, still became a great King of the English and his half-brothers by Ælfflæd did not.
Generally no, for a few reasons.
1) Most empires did not include any kingdoms, or had a single kingdom that was held by the ruler of the empire. (The British and French Empires, for example). In these places there was only one king. Now the empire might have client states that had their own kings, but at least basic respect to the autonomy of client states would suggest an emperor would not insult them by going and demanding their chair.
2) Many emperors weren’t particularly powerful. Being the Holy Roman Emperor was a dangerous matter that put you in the sights of a lot scheming German dukes and princes that might well be more powerful then you are. Others were mostly symbolic. A Japanese or Great Ming Emperor could, on a good day, pick what they would have for lunch and get some paper to write a pome on.
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