In recent decades, the rise of global history has encouraged historians to look for connections and comparisons across time and space. This approach has yielded insights, but it also poses a challenge: how to preserve the integrity of local contexts while recognising patterns that emerge across societies shaped by different geographies, climates, and political traditions. Political structures, whether in Kyoto or Frankfurt, Constantinople or Westminster, arose from specific circumstances, yet often display strikingly similar strategies for reconciling legitimacy and power, temporal and spiritual authority. Attending to these parallels does not mean erasing their differences; rather, it invites us to ask why certain arrangements recur, and what this repetition reveals about the nature of sovereignty itself.

Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), a German physician in the service of the Dutch East India Company, spent two years at the trading outpost in Nagasaki at the close of the 17th century. His posthumous History of Japan, published in London in 1727, gave European readers one of the earliest sustained accounts of Japan’s political order and society. What struck Kaempfer was its structure. Power was divided – though far from equally – between an emperor who reigned in ceremonial seclusion and a military ruler who governed in his name. Japan, Kaempfer wrote, was a state in which ‘mutual checks, jealousies, and mistrusts of persons invested with power are thought the most effectual means to oblige them to discharge their respective duties’. He described a long and unbroken line of ‘ecclesiastical hereditary Emperors, all descended from one family… still keeping their title, rank, and grandeur’, yet ‘dispossessed of their sovereign power by the Secular Monarchs [whom he elsewhere styled ‘Crown-Generals’]’. Kaempfer’s English translator made the duality plain: ‘as affairs now stand in Japan, there are properly two Emperors, an Ecclesiastical and a Secular’. To readers familiar with the ceremonial supremacy of the Pope and the contested authority of the Holy Roman Emperor, the analogy spoke for itself.

Across history, sovereignty has rarely been a simple matter of one ruler holding unchallenged power. States and polities have found countless ways to divide, disguise, or distribute authority, sometimes to reconcile rival claims, sometimes to preserve the dignity of an office while transferring its powers elsewhere. In the modern age, these arrangements became ever more diverse. Constitutional monarchies, papal-imperial compacts, shogunal governments, and national churches each offered their own solutions, blending local traditions with pressures that were often global in scope. The variety is striking, but so too is the shared instinct: to root political change in forms that felt ancient, even when the reality they concealed was new.

In this sense, the story of sovereignty is also one of human imagination. The arrangements of any given polity – whether in East Asia, Europe, or the wider world – emerged from a blend of inherited forms and contemporary needs. Modernity did not replace these older templates; rather, it reworked them, combining local precedent with imported ideas to produce settlements that could endure. This is why the study of one system, however remote in geography or culture, often illuminates another. Patterns recur: ceremonial figureheads beside working rulers, religious authority coexisting with political command, and elaborate rituals designed to cloak change in the garments of continuity.

The system Kaempfer encountered had deep roots. Its endurance matters because it offered Japan a durable solution to the perennial problem of how power might be exercised without eroding the legitimacy of the throne. Long before the Tokugawa took power at the dawn of the 17^th century, Japanese politics had already settled into a pattern in which rituals and religious sovereignty and executive command occupied different hands. This arrangement, though it emerged gradually, gained formal shape at the end of the 12th century, when Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-99), a military leader from the eastern provinces, received from the court the revived title of sei-i-tai-shogun. Once a temporary commission for generals tasked with pacifying the northern frontier (like the Roman dictatores), the title served now to legitimise a new kind of rule. From his base in Kamakura, far from the courtly rhythms of Kyoto, Yoritomo established a military government, or bakufu, which did not seek to abolish the imperial office, but to render it politically inert. The emperor remained sacral and sovereign in name, while the work of government quietly passed to others.

The dual structure endured, though it was never beyond challenge. From time to time, an emperor or courtly faction sought to reclaim the substance of rule. The most determined was Go-Daigo (1288-1339), who attempted to revive the conditions of earlier eras, when the throne governed in fact as well as in name. His bid was bold but short-lived; its failure ended a tradition of centralised imperial administration that had lasted for seven centuries. In its wake, authority fractured: the emperor remained cloistered at the heart of courtly rites and dynastic memory, honoured in title but absent from the conduct of public affairs.

By the 15th century, even the authority of this early shogunate had begun to dissolve. Under the later Ashikaga rulers (1336-1573), the bakufu grew dependent on shifting alliances among powerful military families, whose rivalries soon eclipsed the court’s jurisdiction altogether. From the 1470s onwards, no effective central government remained. The country broke apart into rival domains, each governed by an aristocratic ruler, or daimyō, bound to Kyoto by little more than ritual assent. This Sengoku Jidai (‘age of the country at war’) was a prolonged crisis of political form. Sovereignty became a local affair, sustained by force, alliance, and the capacity to withstand military pressure. The court retained its formal precedence, but its proclamations bore scant relation to the world beyond its great gates.

Order began to return in the late 16th century. The work of restoration fell first to Oda Nobunaga (1534–82), who recognised that no lasting settlement was possible while the great Buddhist sects retained political autonomy. His campaigns against their fortified monasteries in the central provinces were relentless; once they were subdued, he turned to the daimyō, compelling submission through a blend of coercion and administrative reform. By garrisoning key provinces, reinforcing arterial routes, and placing taxation in the hands of trusted retainers, Nobunaga redefined the terms of sovereignty, moving authority away from autonomous estates towards a central command, though still under the formal supremacy of the throne.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98), Nobunaga’s former retainer, completed the process of unification. By 1590, with the fall of the Hōjō stronghold at Odawara, he had brought the remaining daimyō to heel. Though never appointed shogun – his origins lay too far from the court – he governed with full imperial recognition, holding the posts of kampaku (regent) and dajō-daijin (chief minister). Where Nobunaga had ruled by force, Hideyoshi preferred settlement, narrowing the daimyō’s field of action without dismantling their estates. His land survey of 1582-98 recorded the size, yield, and structure of each domain, enabling precise taxation and enforceable obligations. The ‘sword hunt’ of 1588 required peasants to surrender their arms, which were melted down and recast as Buddhist statuary, at once a symbolic act and a practical curb on local military power.

Hideyoshi ruled without hereditary claim, his authority framed within courtly forms and sanctioned by the emperor. Yet the office of shogun remained out of reach, and his attempt to secure the succession for his young son Hideyori (1593-1615) collapsed almost immediately after his death in 1598. The fragile settlement he had built would be secured only under Tokugawa Ieyasu, whose regime gave lasting form to the uneasy balance between throne and military rule.

Ieyasu (1543-1616) moved with deliberate care. A senior figure in the regency council established to govern on behalf of Hideyori, he waited until the convergence of allies and resources made a decisive move possible. Victory at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 gave him effective command of the country. Three years later, in 1603, he received from Emperor Go-Yōzei (1571-1617) the title of sei-i-tai-shogun, reviving the institutional form first assumed by Yoritomo four centuries earlier. Ieyasu sought to anchor his authority in a fabricated genealogy (like the early Habsburgs in Europe), tracing the Tokugawa line to the ancient Minamoto clan. The court complied, and the imperial patent of appointment was issued without resistance. Once more, the forms of deference were observed, but the substance of rule had passed elsewhere.

Ieyasu held the title of shogun for only two years. In 1605, while still in command, he transferred it to his son Hidetada (1579-1632), retaining influence as retired ruler. This early abdication allowed him to supervise the succession while consolidating the new regime. Hidetada reigned until 1623, when he in turn passed the office to his son Iemitsu (1604-51). With each transition, the Tokugawa presented their government as a hereditary trust, confirmed by the emperor and exercised in his name. The early shoguns understood that authority was not self-sustaining; it required the continuity of policy, containment of rivals, and the appearance of harmony with the court.

Crucially, the Tokugawa shogunate did not seek to abolish the imperial court, the aristocracy, or the great religious foundations. Instead, it drew them into Edo’s orbit, binding court, temple, and nobility through ritual, law, and fiscal oversight. Like Hideyoshi before them, the Tokugawa ruled as ‘first subjects’, acting on behalf of the emperor while retaining the substance of powers in their own hands. They upheld the language of deference, preserved the rituals of subordination, and confirmed their appointments through court ceremony. Yet their approach was more systematic: the independence of the great monasteries and of daimyō was tolerated within limits, codified by edicts and reinforced by administrative oversight.

It is evident, then, that at the core of the Tokugawa settlement lay an unbroken allegiance to the emperor. As Kaempfer noted, even after the ‘Crown-Generals wrestled the Government of secular affairs entirely out of their hands’, the emperors retained ‘their rank and splendour, their ancient title and magnificent way of life, their authority in Church affairs, and one very considerable prerogative of the supreme power, the granting of titles and honours’. In constitutional terms, the shogun ruled not by independent right but as the emperor’s delegate; there had been no interregnum, no break in dynastic legitimacy. In 1615 the emperor’s movements were restricted, his household placed under surveillance, and senior courtly and ecclesiastical appointments required shogunal approval. The throne retained the dignity of appointing each new shogun and performing the rites that placed him, in Confucian language, as mediator between Heaven and Earth, or, in Shinto terms, between divine ancestors and the people of Japan. But it did so under supervision, confined to Kyoto much as a Pope might be enclosed within the Vatican after the unification of Italy – mutatis mutandis.

The Tokugawa applied the same methodical oversight to religious institutions. Between 1601 and 1616, a series of edicts placed the management of Buddhist clerical estates under direct shogunal supervision, while confirming internal autonomy in matters of doctrine and hierarchy. Revenues were assessed, appointments recorded, and obligations enforced through newly appointed temple magistrates. Shinto institutions were brought under similar control.

The third element of Tokugawa control was the administration of local government. There the daimyō retained the capacity for armed resistance, they governed extensive territories, commanded their own retainers, and, in many cases, had risen through their own campaigns. To limit their autonomy, the Tokugawa issued an edict in 1615, forbidding troop movements beyond domain boundaries, the construction of new castles, political alliances without approval, and marriages outside shogunal oversight. Later edicts prohibited coining money, direct communication with the imperial court, and the building of large ships. These measures did not strip the daimyō of their internal institutions, but they made rebellion impracticable. Obedience was reinforced through ritual as well as statute. Under the system of alternate attendance daimyō were required to spend part of each year in Edo, leaving wives and heirs in the capital as implicit hostages; the cost of maintaining two households strained even the wealthiest domains.

Direct shogunal rule extended to roughly a quarter of the country, the rest governed by some 260 daimyō, each responsible for his own domain. This baku-han system was neither a federation nor a true central state, but an arrangement in which self-governing domains operated within a shared framework of regulation, ritual, and oversight. Edo retained control over foreign relations, coinage, religious policy, and matters touching the prestige of the court. The regime tolerated inefficiency, overlapping jurisdictions, and a surplus of bureaucrats as the price of peace. By 1700, no daimyō could plausibly challenge Tokugawa authority; by 1800, government rested less on law than on habit, lineage, and the cumulative weight of precedent. From the late 18th century, however, the system began to show signs of strain. Fiscal pressures, external threats, and social unrest increasingly tested the logic of divided sovereignty, foreshadowing the eventual collapse of the Tokugawa order in the mid-19th century.

Beyond preserving peace, the Tokugawa system cultivated a distinctive style of governance in which policy was cautious, aims were publicly stated, and means were governed by precedent. There were no grand reforms, yet the architecture of government was rational in form and moderate in ambition. If modernisation entails the growth of civil administration, the regularisation of authority, and the displacement of charismatic rule by procedure, then Tokugawa Japan belongs to the modern age, even if it arrived there by other paths.

For European observers, Tokugawa Japan seemed to confound categories: venerable yet dynamic, feudal yet organised. Kaempfer, who described the country’s dual order, was himself a subject of the Holy Roman Empire – a polity equally defined by negotiated authority, layered jurisdictions, and the careful accommodation of rival powers. It is here that the closest European parallel emerges: the relationship between emperor and pope, the most enduring of the Empire’s many constitutional compromises. The Tokugawa model thus invites direct comparison with European systems of divided sovereignty, where rule and legitimacy were likewise distributed across overlapping institutions and persons.

The emperor claimed universal jurisdiction but acknowledged the latter as spiritual superior; the pope crowned emperors but could not command them. What emerged was a relationship of tension, performance, and mutual dependence – a rivalry which, like that between shogun and emperor, owed its longevity to the forms of respect it preserved.

The fiction of harmony began with Charlemagne (748-814). On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III (d.816) placed the imperial crown on the Frankish king’s head, reviving a western title dormant since the fall of Rome. The act was theatrical and ambiguous: Leo claimed the right to make emperors; Charlemagne, in practice, would act without papal leave. Over the centuries the office acquired its own institutional weight yet never shed its dependence on papal legitimacy. Until the 16^th century, no emperor was truly crowned until anointed in Rome; no pope stood securely without the backing of secular arms.

Like in Japan, this uneasy compact shaped the fortunes of both offices. The Investiture Controversy of the 11th century (ostensibly a dispute over the right to appoint bishops) was in truth a clash of cosmologies. Pope Gregory VII (1020-85) insisted that spiritual authority must direct the temporal; Emperor Henry IV (1050-1106) claimed that his right to govern extended to the Church within his lands. Their struggle produced enduring symbols: the emperor’s excommunication, his barefoot penance at Canossa, and the long wars that followed. Beneath the doctrinal quarrel lay the more urgent question: who would command, and under whose sanction?

Maximilian I (1459-1519), elected King of the Romans in 1486, secured in 1508 the pope’s permission for kings of the Holy Roman Empire to call themselves ‘elected emperors’ and to use the imperial title without being crowned in Rome. From this point onwards, the title was used for the ‘emperor in waiting’, elected and crowned in his predecessor’s lifetime to ensure succession – a system not entirely unlike that followed by the early Tokugawa shoguns. Even at its height, imperial authority was partial and fragmented. By the time of Charles V (1500-58) the Empire was less a polity than a constellation of jurisdictions. Charles ruled vast territories (Spain, the Low Countries, parts of Italy and the Americas) but could not command the princes of the Reich without their consent. His coronation in Bologna in 1530 was the last performed by a pope.

The Reformation soon destroyed what unity remained between altar and throne. Sovereignty within the Empire became increasingly plural, claimed by electors, bishops, and cities alike. The emperor remained the fountain of honour and law, but enforcement passed to local hands. Emperors and princes effectively checked one another. Neither side wished for a strong government at the centre, lest it diminish their own standing. The emperor was indispensable for opening the imperial diet, advancing an agenda, and exercising a veto; yet for any measure to become law, it required his assent as well as the approval of the diet’s three separate colleges – electors, princes, and imperial cities. Above these temporal arrangements stood the pope, whose authority, spiritual in nature, was in theory supreme. As Martyn Rady has observed, ‘the Holy Roman Empire remained at best a policing institution that existed to curb excesses of violence. Day-to-day power was exercised by the great lords and princes in their territories [whilst] the Empire fulfilled only the most basic functions, operating as a security organisation of last resort’.

Here, the parallel with Tokugawa Japan becomes crystal-clear. The emperor in Kyoto resembled the pope in the Vatican: supreme in dignity, guardian of tradition, essential to the conferral of legitimacy, yet distant from the machinery of rule. The shogun, like the Holy Roman Emperor in relation to the pope, governed in the sovereign’s name, wielding temporal authority while invoking a higher, sacral source. The daimyō, with their hereditary domains and quasi-sovereign powers, recall the electors and princes of the Reich: bound by ritual allegiance to a central figure, yet free to administer their territories within a shared symbolic order.

In both systems, sovereignty was plural, legitimacy layered, and power exercised through ritualised substitution. Over time, the spiritual head became indispensable but inert, while effective governance passed to other, more energetic parts of the constitution – provided they clothed their power in the language of service and deference. By the time Emperor Meiji was ‘restored’ to power in 1868, the Holy Roman Empire had long since vanished; an Austrian emperor ruled from Vienna, and a Prussian king stood poised to take the imperial title of a newly unified Germany.

If the Holy Roman Empire had embodied a model of divided sovereignty, its counterpart to the east, Byzantium, imagined the opposite: a deliberate fusion of temporal and spiritual power. From the time of Constantine the Great (272-337), the Christian Roman emperor was seen as episkopos tōn ektos  – the bishop of those outside the Church’s sacramental hierarchy. He was guardian of the faith, legislator for the Church, convener of councils, and supreme judge in doctrine. In the Byzantine imagination, he was at once basileus of the Romans and the Christos anointed of God. The unity of Church and state was, in principle, total: a single Christian people under a single Christian ruler, custodian of both polity and creed.

Be that as it may, even this seemingly seamless unity required negotiation. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, while subordinate in theory, was an indispensable partner in governance, claiming apostolic succession from Andrew the Apostle. Emperors selected, confirmed, and, on occasion, deposed patriarchs, but relied on their religious authority to consecrate imperial legitimacy. When emperors faltered in war, economy, or doctrine, the patriarch could become a rallying point for opposition. What emerged was a balance of charisma: the emperor embodied divine order, the patriarch divine truth. Each could check the other, though never with complete independence.

This intermingling produced a political theology in which authority was indivisible and sacral. Iconography reinforced the conception: mosaics in Hagia Sophia and elsewhere depict the emperor receiving crown and blessing from Christ himself, not from a cleric or a pope. Moments of crisis exposed the limits of imperial control. From the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries to the hesitations over union with Rome, emperors discovered that in theory they could command, but in practice they had to persuade. The sack of Constantinople in 1204, and its final fall in 1453, revealed the fragility of this system. After the Ottoman conquest, the Byzantine synthesis passed into memory, though not without heirs. The Russian tsars claimed to inherit the mantle of a ‘Third Rome’, uniting Caesar and patriarch in a single body politic.

Taken together, the Tokugawa, Holy Roman, and Byzantine examples reveal that legitimacy is never reducible to power alone. It rests on narrative, ceremony, and the invocation of higher authority. Yet if the Byzantine model fused throne and altar, and the Tokugawa and Holy Roman systems preserved their separation through ritualised deference, Tudor England took a more radical path: it absorbed spiritual authority into the state itself.

The well-known rupture with Rome initiated under Henry VIII (1491-1547) did not abolish the Church; it nationalised it. By asserting imperium over sacerdotium, the Tudor monarchs created a structure in which the Crown supplanted the Pope as supreme head of the Church in England. This was more than symbolic. The monarch appointed bishops, defined doctrine, and exercised control over liturgy and ecclesiastical courts. Parliament codified this authority, and the Crown’s will became the locus of religious legitimacy.

The genius of the Elizabethan Settlement lay in fusing theological ambiguity with institutional stability. It established a national church broad enough to accommodate multiple strands of Protestant belief, yet narrow enough to exclude both papal authority and radical dissent. In this, it echoed the Tokugawa instinct for containment through regulation: as the Edo bakufu tolerated sectarian diversity under close supervision, the Tudor regime enforced outward conformity while avoiding excessive intrusion into private belief, provided it did not spill into sedition.

Unlike the Tokugawa or Byzantine systems, however, the English settlement was not a balance between pre-existing estates, but an assertion of supremacy by the state over the Church; it was neither dyarchy nor divine kingship in the Byzantine sense. The monarch retained many outward forms of sacred kingship: the coronation rite, the royal touch, and the liturgical role of sovereign as temporal shepherd of a Christian people. The long-term consequence was the gradual secularisation of spiritual authority. What began as a political assertion of royal supremacy evolved into a tradition of parliamentary sovereignty, in which religious structures were ultimately subordinated to civil law. The English monarch became the final source of authority in both temporal and spiritual realms.

These political settlements, shaped in Kyoto, Constantinople, Frankfurt, and Westminster, were never mere relics of a vanished order. Each arose as an answer to the pressures of its moment and each found durability by giving contradiction institutional form. Their genius lay in making tension a source of stability: sovereignty was divided, legitimacy layered, and power refracted through ritual, law, and story.

Though the Enlightenment celebrated the ideal of separated powers, in practice most societies found it elusive. What endured instead was a dance of authority: sovereigns who held titles without command, ministers who ruled under borrowed names, and institutions whose strength lay precisely in their ambiguity. The common reflex in these systems was the art of clothing change in the familiar – weaving new settlements into the fabric of the old and drawing legitimacy from the very traditions they were reshaping. Such arrangements remind us that the making of modernity owed as much to artful accommodation and layered compromise as to any decisive rupture with the past.

In our own, less imaginative age, one that prizes transparency, directness, and innovation, such elaborate settlements may seem antiquated. Perhaps so. Yet wherever we find kings without kingdoms, presidents with only a ceremonial brief, or political life saturated in pageantry, the pattern described here persists. Legitimacy still rarely rests on a single pillar; it is sustained by the interplay of law, tradition, and performance. The lesson of these polities is a chastening one: that endurance in politics often depends less on the concentration of power than on its careful distribution, and that authority, to be accepted, must often disguise itself in the forms of service, deference, and shared rule.