The term Paramount Ruler, or sometimes Paramount King, is a generic description, though occasionally also used as an actual title, for a number of rulers' position in relative terms, as the summit of a feudal-type pyramid of rulers of lesser polities (such as vassal princes) in a given historical and geographical context, often of different ranks, which all recognize the single Paramount Ruler as their senior, though not necessarily with effectively commanding authority (as in a true empire), but often rather a notion like the Western suzerainty.
Whether the term is used where it could apply is essentially a matter of convention, and as the relatively vague, similar definitions overlap, its use may in certain cases coexist with the use of another term as those mentioned in the See also section.
Read more about Paramount Ruler: Domestic Cases, Use For Foreign Rulers, See Also, Sources and References
Famous quotes containing the words paramount and/or ruler:
“There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)