What I mean by this are rulers of various polities being given sobriquets that described their reign, more or less. Basically Louis XIV of France being the Sun King or Ivan IV of Russia being termed Grozny, which in English has the less nuanced equivalent "the Terrible".
What sorts of linguistic or cultural PODs would suffice to make it so that this styling lasts past the Napoleonic Era, when it seems that said epithets went out of fashion?