I'm a little confused on what exactly an empire is and how its different from a 'regular' kingdom.
Is it the trappings/vestiges of republicanism, like in Imperial Rome and Napoleonic France? Or is it the shear amount of land and subjects, get big enough and yourself an empire? Is its it holding a lot of different peoples under one government? Or is it having lesser kings as vassals?
It's all about the dickwaving actually.
An empire has an emperor, a kingdom has a king, there's no real difference except for the prestige
>empire
official titles are meaningless. However, a king is specifically given divine right to rule and that is the source of his authority, whereas an emperor is usually either a god himself or it has nothing to do with gods and the emperor is whoever has the biggest army, aka Imperial Rome. Emperors rule by right of strength, whereas kings also technically rule with strength but claim divine right in case they happen to not be the strongest guy around. Emperors don't need divine right, their power comes from their own hand.
The emperor wears no clothes.
see
>Is its it holding a lot of different peoples under one government
This is the definition I'm most familiar with. Another way of putting it is that an empire is composed of multiple nations whereas a kingdom is a single nation.
Let not the right hand know what the left hand does.
I bet the Military Industrial Complex formed it's own independence from American Government and erected themselves an Emperor.
Classically, an emperor rules over more than one dominion. For example, he rules over two kingdoms.
So, an empire is a group of several nations ruled by a common overlord.
You have the example of the ancient Persian Empire. Darius ruled over Persia itself and several satrapies, which were technically kingdoms, with satraps which were more or less kings.
I have the personal view that an Empire is a political entity that does not recognize limits to its field of activity.
From the Chinese emperors calling "all under heaven" their birthright, to the Holy Roman Emperors claiming overlordship of all Christian monarchs. And, of course, the U.S. and its "responsability to protect" and the Soviet Union with its mission to spread communism in the whole world.
That would exclude some "empires" that called itself that but were just big countries with a lot of people within it, as the Russian Empire and the (lol) "Empire of Brazil".
Another example, the Roman Empire.
One empire, one kingodm, one nation. But with several entities inside itself, in the form of several people of different cultural backgrounds, having different languages, etc.
Chinese Empire (all of them). The chinese emperors usually ruled over several ethnic groups and/or kingdoms.
The Portuguese Empire. Technically three kingdoms: Portugal, Algarve, Brazil.
"Holy" "Roman" Empire. Ruled over germans, slavs, italians, incorporated several kingdoms and smaller states. I'm only counting the times it was more united. In other occasions the Empire part was "Empire".
Now we arrive at so called "empires" which were in reality sad dickwaving.
Serbian Empire, Bulgarian Empire and Empire of Brazil come to mind.
>forgetting the mighty empire of haiti
Originally, the only emperor was the ruler of Rome and all European emperors considered themselves to be successors of the Roman emperor. This lasted until the 19th and 20th century when Europeans first decided to stop jerking off to Rome and look for inspiration in nationalist myths.
In the newer meaning of the term, an emperor is usually a ruler of a large powerful state that is composed either of different smaller states or various nations or something similar to that. The term is pretty loosely defined and is sometimes used by randoms who claim to be supreme kings.
Empires are usually multi-ethnic or multi-national, having formerly-independent peoples under their rule. Most empires from history conform to this definition so it is one that historians often use. Strictly speaking though, any country can call itself an empire if they want. Japan has called itself an empire for nearly 2000 years despite being a paltry collection of ethnically homogeneous rice kingdoms when it was founded.
Empire has a more ambitious ring to it though, it's farther reaching. There are no real limits to empire. A kingdom is ruled by a king, but it often describes a discrete place or people whose borders are not so flexible. Kingdoms can expand, but it necessitates transferring control of the conquered lands to the king's domain. With an empire you don't really have to do that. Empire's are flexible, they often allow local nobles and rulers to hold onto their lands and just ask for tribute/fealty and obedience to the Imperial Laws or what have you, but are otherwise still discrete polities unto themselves.
>Serbian Empire, Bulgarian Empire
Only westerners call them empires for some reason. Their title translate to czardoms (i.e. kingdoms) and they never really pretended to be empires in any capacity.
t. slav
This is a bunch of BS. There's no rules about how an autocrat gets his authority. Kings throughout history are usually whoever controls the production of food and has the loyalty of the soldiers. They are the wealthiest landowner who can then make the rules everybody else has to obey. Emperors are basically just kings who conquer other kingdoms and force them to obey their rules.
Informative. Thanks.
>Only westerners call them empires for some reason.
That's wrong.
>Their title translate to czardoms (i.e. kingdoms)
Czar/Car is a Slavic word for "emperor", coming from "Caesar". The also used the Greek basileus title which was used by Byzantine Emperors.
>and they never really pretended to be empires in any capacity.
They wanted a patriarch of their own specifically for this purpose. The Serbian Emperor had himself crowned Emperor of Serbs and Greeks/Romans and wanted to replace the somewhat weakened Byzantine Empire.
Do you happen to know anything about China and why their rulers are styled as emperors?
>This lasted until the 19th and 20th century when Europeans first decided to stop jerking off to Rome and look for inspiration in nationalist myths
But even those were not free of Roman aspirations. Nazi Germany stylized itself as the "Third Reich," following the Holy Roman Empire (first reich) and German Empire (second reich). The Nazi emblem also has a black eagle perched on top of the swastika, the eagle being ultimately derived from the imperial Roman standard by way of the HRE's coat of arms.
The rule of thumb is that an empire entails multiple ethnic groups and social spheres united via the power projection of a particular centralized government
So the EU?
And the United States, depending on how you look at it.
Ehh
In a way yes but in practice I'd say the EU central body lacks the domineering authority over its constituents that you'd find in more traditional examples of empires
Or at least lacks the express authority of an autocratic ruler and the power projection is more political scheming than military might
If the USA is an empire they're a weirdly restrained one. Protectorates and puppet states abound wherever their influence is strong, but extremely few external territories they rule outright. The American doctrine appears to be setting up sham governments they can then influence and manipulate rather than governing territory themselves. I'm not saying it's not an empire, but it's an empire unlike anything the world has seen.
>Czar/Car is a Slavic word for "emperor", coming from "Caesar". The also used the Greek basileus title which was used by Byzantine Emperors.
The etymology of the word changes with translation. "Car" is used to name all non-emperor rulers of the pre-fall of rome Europe (or more preciesly, non-catholic rulers) +orthodox kings. There is a completely different word for emperor taken directly from latin- imperator.
>They wanted a patriarch of their own specifically for this purpose.
They wanted a patriarch in order to be able to crown their own kings independent of Byzantium and become "real" kingdoms. The Bulgrian and Serbian patriarchies are still "outranked" by the Ecumenical Patriarchy.
>The Serbian Emperor had himself crowned Emperor of Serbs and Greeks/Romans and wanted to replace the somewhat weakened Byzantine Empire.
This is simply title wankery of several rulers for several decades and cannot be slapped as an name of their countries which existed for centuries. Simeon I was also crowned tzar of bulgarians and romans but it had no legitimacy. They were de facto called tzars and controlled tzardoms and not empires (i.e. First Bulgarian Empire sounds horrendously infactual and any serious local historian would laugh at you for even naming it that way).
>The American doctrine appears to be setting up sham governments they can then influence and manipulate rather than governing territory themselves
>it's an empire unlike anything the world has seen.
We've seen this kind of empire many times
DONC,
CE QUE VOUS ME
C'EST
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DES ROIS ET MERDE????
Like who?
Got it
In theory, it is a single polity ruling over multiple lands and ethnicities.
In practice, if you called yourself an emperor (based on some invented connection to Rome) and everyone chose to go along with it (before the reformation that "everyone" was the pope), then congratulations, you were an emperor.
To make matters more confusing, some polities are at certain points of their history referred to as empires to signify that the period is the height of their power even though no one (including themselves) called them empires during that period.
A kingdom is its own entity, a realm.
An Empire is the extent of territory an Emperor reigns over.
>reigns over.
(i.e. has imperium over)
Like Rome, for much of its history. The empire depended as much on client states as it did on direct province control. Armenia is the most immediate example of that kind of relationship.
>Empire of Brazil
>not a large polity ruling over many different people
So, is Indonesian an empire?
Emperor is just a term used to translate 皇帝 Huangdi which was created by the first Emperor to emphasize the superiority of his position. The previous title of 王 or wang, once held the same prestige, but because of the waning of the central state during the late Zhou period, what was once a highly prestigious and ceremonial title began to be usurped and used by every two bit Duke in the kingdom.
Furthermore, the characters of 皇 huang and 帝 di were used as the nominal titles of the first eight mythical rulers of China, beings who did things such as order the sky and invent agriculture, and more importantly were said to be the forefathers of the Shang dynasty, from which the Shang derived their legitimacy, from whom the Zhou derived theirs, and from whom the Qin were attempting to derive theirs.
To simply translate this as King would not only cause conundrums about what the fuck to call the "Wang" but also fail to communicate just how superior the personage of the Emperor was in China. He was so above all others, the Emperor literally had a special pronoun reserved only for his use.
Furthermore, in European styling, Emperors had authoritative and ceremonial power superior to Kings, and if you wanted access to Chinese trade, the first, and often only thing, you needed to do was admit your ruler was a bitch and an inferior to the Chinese one. Calling him a "king" would imply him equal to a European ruler, and shut you out of the market, while according him status as Emperor assumed your state as inferior and granted you access to market.
China Loosly.
The Gupta's of India
The Wehrmacht was really the most advanced for it's time army in the past 10 centuries they only lost because the winter of 43' was cold also also because the Italians dragged them into Africa also the Luftwaffe would have been better if there weren't so many supply shortages once they had jets by the way did you know that not all nazis were evil some of them were okay people the holocaust happened but it probably wasn't as severe as people say it was-
INHALE
it wouldn't have feasible to use precious fuel and resources doing something that didn't contribute to the war effort did you know that Albert Speer was a really good architect also he didn't know about the holocaust so he's not a bad guy also Hugo Boss designed the uniforms don't they look cool they look so cool dude all the German generals were really smart it's just that Hitler kept making bad decisions if it weren't for him the Wehrmacht totally would have repelled D-Day and captured Moscow and Stalingrad did you know that Hitler didn't want to bomb civilians in London it's just that the British accidentally bombed some civilians in Germany and that made him retaliate also the firebombing of Dresden was way worse also did I mention that the only reason the Germans lost is because of Italy and the winter of 43' being really cold and Hitler not crowning Rommel grand Fuhrer of the Wehrmact and god-emperor of all things
INHALE
Anyway, I'm gonna catch you guys later. Let me know if you want to play some Hearts of Iron 3