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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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.
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