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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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.
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