Emperor

An emperor (from Latin: 'imperator' ) is a (male) monarch, usually the sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife (empress consort), mother (empress dowager), or a woman who rules in her own right (empress regnant). Emperors are generally recognized to be of a higher honor and rank than kings.

Both kings and emperors are monarchs, but emperor and empress are considered the higher monarchical titles. In so far as there is a strict definition of emperor, it is that an emperor has no relations implying the superiority of any other ruler, and typically rules over more than one nation. Thus a king might be obliged to pay tribute to another ruler, or be restrained in his actions in some unequal fashion, but an emperor should in theory be completely free of such restraints. However monarchs heading empires have not always used the title—the British sovereign did not assume the title until the incorporation of India into the British Empire, and even then used it only in a limited context. For this reason, the titles "Emperor/Empress" are not used in the Union.

Outside the European context, emperor was the translation given to holders of titles who were accorded the same precedence as European emperors in diplomatic terms. In reciprocity, these rulers might accredit equal titles in their native languages to their European peers. Through centuries of international convention, this had become the dominant rule to identifying an emperor in the modern era.

Some empires, such as the Holy Roman Empire and the Russian Empire, derived their office from the authority of the Roman Emperors. The title was a conscious attempt by monarchs to link themselves to the institutions and traditions of the Romans as part of state ideology. Historians have liberally used emperor and, especially so, empire anachronistically and out of its Roman and European context to describe any large state in the past and present; sometimes even to refer to non-monarchically ruled states and their spheres of influence: such examples include the "Athenian Empire" of the late 5th century BCE, the "AngevinEmpire" of the Plantagenets, or the Soviet and American "empires" of the Cold War era. However such "empires" did not need to be headed by an "emperor". Empire became identified with vast territorial holdings rather than the title of its ruler by the mid-18th century CE.