I’m deep diving this and Wikipedia’s explanation just isn’t doing it for me. How can one person be the head of multiple countries?
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This happens all the time in European history. Here is another example:
King James VI of Scotland was invited to become King of England in 1603. England and Scotland did not become the same country at this time (they waited til 1707, when the parliaments of each country voted for it). England had never had a King James before so James Stuart became King James I of England and at the same time King James VI of Scotland. His successor was Charles I who inherited both crowns but there may legitimately have been, hypothetically, two different successors, one inheriting the Scottish crown, one the English.
Here’s another:
Henry II, the Plantagenet king of England, was King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and Count of Maine. As King of England he was a sovereign lord in his own right. But by the Treaty of Paris (1259) Henry owed fealty to the king of France for the lands of Normandy, Anjou and Maine. This didn’t disturb his rule over these areas, but they were accepted as part of Capetian France.
So one king could not only be king of multiple countries (like England and Scotland before the 1707 Act of Union), but could be king in one country and a lesser lord in a different country.
Who was king was usually a matter of who the barons or parliaments wanted to be king or were forced to accept as king, and this could be one country or it could be 15, where that country conquered all the others but didn’t integrate them into the same body-politic as the conquering nation.
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