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Being an Emperor
This book is a collective biography of emperors and an anatomy of hereditary imperial monarchy as a type of polity. Empires and imperial monarchies had existed since ancient times, but the last true empires disappeared in the twentieth century. In this book I cover the history of empire across the millennia and throughout most of the world. At the book's heart lies a key tension. To make any sense of so vast a topic requires concepts, comparisons and generalizations. But this book is less about empires than about the people who ruled them. It is to some extent possible to generalize about emperors and divide them into distinct groups and categories. Individual dynasties, for example, had specific traditions. But in the end monarchs were human beings and their individual personalities were crucial. One way of approaching this book is to see it as a contribution to the old debate about the roles of impersonal forces and human agency in history.
Sometimes when dining at Trinity College, Cambridge, I was asked about my research by other Fellows who were natural scientists. I tried to argue that their research and mine were similar. Often they were experimenting with how materials behaved at extreme temperatures and I was doing the same to human beings. Being an emperor often strained an individual beyond what the human frame was designed to tolerate. The results could be spectacular. One happy example must suffice. Writing this book in isolation in my house on a Japanese mountain during the pandemic I often had recourse to the BBC's international news. For many months before news bulletins there frequently appeared a clip from the admirable Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, in which she said that she was only the second national leader in history to bear a child when in office. Her intention - to act as a role model for young women - was splendid, but I felt it a shame to ignore the story of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (r. 1740-80). When she inherited the throne aged twenty-three she had no experience or training in government. Her father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, considered this inappropriate for a female. So he had appointed her husband, Prince Francis Stephen of Lorraine, to the key imperial council rather than her. Maria Theresa loved Francis Stephen deeply but after her father's death in 1740 she quickly made it clear that she was the boss. Four enemy armies - Prussian, French, Bavarian and Saxon - invaded her empire, since a woman's claim to inherit a crown was easily disputed. Courage and strong leadership qualities rescued Maria Theresa and her empire from near catastrophe. She ruled for forty years, playing the leading role in government and administration, and leaving behind an empire which was not just much more powerful and prosperous than before but also more humane. During these years she gave birth to sixteen children. What can it have been like, to live such a life and work in such an extraordinary role? What qualities did it take to perform this role successfully? These are key themes of this book.
Most of what we know about emperors relates to how they did their jobs. Even today, the personalities of top leaders often disappear behind the office they hold and the behaviour it imposes on them. An emperor's personality was even more likely to be subsumed in the majesty of his office, for which he had usually been prepared since childhood and which he held until he died. Even in modern times a monarchy's aura and legitimacy require an element of mystery. In the past that was even more the case, since the monarch was in general both a semi-sacred figure and the supreme political leader. No monarch could safely reveal his innermost thoughts to his subjects. Although there are a few exceptions, in general the further back one goes in history the scantier becomes the evidence about the inner man behind the royal mask. Nevertheless, enough evidence does exist to enable me to present a rounded and plausible picture of some emperors. As always with human beings, their personalities were formed by a combination of inherited genes, upbringing and the cultural norms of their families, societies and eras. My task is to place these personalities within the context of the specific challenges, constraints and opportunities they faced.
I have been studying aspects of imperial monarchy for much of my academic life. Even so, the sheer scale and complexity of this book makes writing it a challenge. My first chapter is an attempt to guide the reader across a vast and complicated terrain. Fortunately this terrain does have many common features. Emperors often faced similar challenges. They often used comparable means and tactics to achieve their goals. All of them operated within powerful and sometimes typical constraints. The most obvious of these constraints were external: they included pre-modern communications and the power of foreign states and domestic vested interests. Constraints were also internal, meaning an emperor's own values and intellectual horizons. In this chapter I introduce some of the key themes that run through my book: these include the human life cycle, the dynamics of family politics, the role of women, the politics of succession and the training of heirs. Leadership is also a key uniting theme in this book. For emperors, leadership usually came in many guises. To varying degrees and in different combinations emperors could be sacred symbols, warrior kings, political leaders, chief executive officers of the government machine, heads of a family, impresarios directing the many elements of 'soft power' essential to any regime's survival. Tracing the different and shifting balance between these elements of an emperor's role, across individual monarchs, dynastic traditions and eras, is one of the main tasks of the book.
Four key elements went into the make-up of an emperor. First, he was a human being, and in the great majority of cases a male. Second, he was a leader. Third, he was a hereditary monarch. Fourth, he ruled over an empire. In this book, and especially when constructing biographical sketches of emperors, all four elements in his make-up merge. For now, however, addressing them separately helps us to understand who emperors were and what their role entailed.
The most important similarity between emperors was also the most banal. The emperor was a human being. He therefore had the basic human need for food, drink, sleep and sex. Humans are social animals and most emperors needed company and even friendship. They were also usually capable of appreciating beauty and feeling love. Each stage of human life has its specific features. The child is vulnerable, the young man seeks to assert himself, the older one can gain a measure of wisdom from his experience, old people lose physical and mental endurance. Being humans, emperors did not live long and had to face the prospect of death, but they also contemplated the mystery of birth and fertility among humans, animals and plants. From earliest times emperors like other human beings looked at the stars and wondered about the meaning of life and earth's relationship to the heavens.
Of course, human nature and, above all, the human mind did not remain static over the millennia covered by this book. Most monarchs in prehistory were semi-sacred figures who mediated between living humans and the spirits permeating the world of nature, the realm inhabited by dead ancestors and the forces in the heavens that directed affairs on earth. These monarchs provided a link to mysterious powers such as the sun, fire and fertility. In modern parlance they were shamans. The only emperor still reigning on earth is the Japanese monarch, Naruhito. In terms of status and antiquity his closest contemporary rivals are Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and King Philip VI of Spain. As is the case with all the older European dynasties, the British and Spanish monarchs are the descendants of leaders of war-bands who were semi-domesticated by one of the great salvation religions, Christianity. Emperor Naruhito's lineage dates to a more ancient and animist world of sacred monarchy.
In the centuries between roughly 500 BCE and 700 CE there emerged the great religions and ethical systems that to a significant degree still define the world's major cultural zones: Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam. All the great empires in time adopted one or other of these religions. In the Chinese case a synthesis between Confucianism and Buddhism evolved over time. These religions offered rulers explanations of life's meaning, a degree of inner calm and purpose, a system of ethics and a cosmology. But these religions were forced to cohabit with an older world of magic and astrology. Until the sixteenth century even Christian and Islamic theologians admitted that the stars might be a part of the divine message and plan. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment undermined this belief and created a fundamental shift in thinking. As regards both personality and policy there are some similarities between the Roman emperor Julian I ('the Apostate':
r. 361-3 CE) and Joseph II of Austria (r. 1765-90 CE). Both were intelligent and thoughtful men, but their impatience and excitability could at times verge on hysteria. Unlike most hereditary emperors, they both came to the throne with radical plans for domestic reform. Julian sought to restore paganism, Joseph to implement fundamental reforms based on Enlightenment principles of utility, uniformity and progress. In both cases the emperors' domestic programmes were wrecked by their adventurous foreign policies and the wars these caused. In one sense, therefore, Julian and Joseph are good subjects for comparison. But a chasm divided the world of classical pagan gods and neo-Platonic metaphysics inhabited by Julian from the secular, utilitarian and rational world view which Joseph imbibed from the Enlightenment.
Normal human attributes could have dramatic consequences when the human was an emperor. For a man who was lord of all he surveyed on earth, death could be even more intolerable than for ordinary mortals. Some monarchs killed themselves swallowing elixirs in order to gain eternal life. The great religions - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Islam - provided answers to questions of death and immortality. Even so, one reason why emperors built palaces, mausolea and monuments of vast scale was their desire to leave their imprint for eternity. Usually educated by the leading cultural figures of their era and possessing vast means, emperors often patronized the finest artists and musicians of their day.
For a monarch, being a patron was much easier than being a friend. Friendship usually entails some degree of equality, along with a measure of banter, repartee and criticism. An insecure or jealous ruler might be especially prone both to yearning for friendship and resenting anyone whose behaviour suggested a degree of intimacy, let alone equality. Some tutors of princes warned them that, once they ascended the throne, they could never have true friends. On the other hand, second-century (CE) Roman thinkers claimed that the four great emperors of Rome's classical era (Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius) were immune to flattery because they opened themselves up to true friendship. Roman aristocratic culture liked to think of the emperor as merely primus inter pares. Most imperial traditions were less 'egalitarian'. A monarch's search for friends might well prove frustrating and fruitless. Given the potential power and patronage of the monarch's 'friends', the search could also have great political consequences. Even more dangerous might be a monarch's quest for sex and love. Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) warned his heir that he must never allow any friend to become a 'favourite' and control the channels of information and patronage on which royal power rested. Still more fatal was a mistress who occupied this position, given that the charms natural to the female sex gave her a uniquely strong hold over a monarch.
This is a reminder that the emperor was not just a normal man but a leader. Much of what is taught about leadership in business schools or written in the memoirs and biographies of present-day presidents and CEOs is relevant to emperors. Manfred Kets de Vries is a professor at INSEAD, one of the world's leading business schools, but also a practising clinical psychoanalyst with a PhD in psychology. His main focus as both professor and psychiatrist is leadership. In his most recent book, The CEO Whisperer, he compares his role in advising and analysing CEOs to that of the fool in a Renaissance monarch's court: he has a licence to speak truth to power. Power is the essence of leadership. The corruptions and temptations of power are one of the oldest tropes in political thinking. Reflecting on his reading about the Nazi leaders but also his lifetime spent in analysing and advising CEOs, Kets de Vries writes that 'it is a sad truth that our inner wolf doesn't need much encouragement to be set free and start devouring everybody who stands in its way'. The education of an emperor was designed in part to control the wolf and even turn him into a sheepdog.
Some of the CEOs whom Kets de Vries describes and analyses had personalities similar to a number of well-known monarchs. Louis XIII of France (r. 1610-43) reigned at a vital time for France and Europe. During his reign the French monarchy regained its power, laid many of the foundations of the modern French state, and successfully led European resistance to possible Habsburg hegemony in Europe. The decisive victory at Rocroi just five days after Louis XIII's death and his son's ascent to the throne was by no means the end of the process by which France replaced the Habsburgs as Europe's leading power, but it marked, in Winston Churchill's words about the victory at El Alamein in November 1942, 'the end of the beginning'. The mastermind of Louis's successes both at home and abroad was his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu. The first half of France's struggle with the Habsburgs put enormous strains on French society and aroused great opposition. Success often hung by a thread and would not have occurred without Richelieu. His hold on power depended on the king's support alone. It was rooted in the shared commitment of monarch and minister to royal power and France's glory. But it also required the minister's expert handling of his king's fragile and unpredictable character.
Louis XIII found living difficult and ruling an excruciating challenge. Physical defects did not help: the king's tongue dangled and he was inclined to slobber. His painful stammer was an everyday reminder of his inner nervousness and lack of confidence. He worshipped his father, Henry IV, and no doubt suffered greatly from his assassination in 1610, as a result of which the already troubled nine-year-old heir suddenly found himself king of France. His mother, Catherine de' Medici, made no secret of her preference for Louis's younger brother, Gaston of OrlŽans, and became the leader of elite opposition to Louis's policies. Louis was bisexual. His life was punctuated by intense emotional relationships with male and female courtiers, all of which ended badly. The king desperately needed emotional support, resented this need, and had a high sense of his status as monarch.
Copyright © 2022 by Dominic Lieven. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
