What are your favorite Royal/Noble styles?

Surprised nobody has mentioned one of the most famous titled historical figures: Alexander the Great
--Basileus of Macedon
--Hegemon of the Hellenic League
--Strategos Autokrator (Absolute General) of All Greece
--Pharaoh of Egypt
--Shah of Persia
--King of Kings
--Lord of All Asia (admittedly, a fair number of these were inherited from the Persian imperial titles)

And the Roman Emperor as an office had a fair number of titles as well:
--First Citizen (princeps)
--Revered One (augustus)
--Consular Imperator
--Censor in Perpetuity
--Tribunician in Perpetuity
--Father of the Country (pater patriae)
--Divi filius (son of a god)
--Dominus (lord and god, although this came later)
And individual emperors had their own individual honorifics: Germanicus, Optimus, Gothicus, Pius, Felix, Invictus, Restitutor Orbis, Maximus, Africanus, etc.

And the most notorious and longest Roman title (as mentioned earlier in the thread): Imperator Caesar Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius
 
Ah, should have figured. Still a neat series of titles though. What did the Ottoman Sultans go by anyway?
From one letter to the Polish king (broken into paragraphs for ease of read):

We are the sultan of the sultans of the East and the West, the lord of the fortunate conjunction of the Roman, Persian, and Arab realms, the distributor of the crowns of the Khosrows of the world, the shadow of God, the munificent king, the servant of the two holy sanctuaries, the second Alexander the Great,

The padishah and the sovereign of the noblest of the towns and cities, Ka'aba the venerated and Medina the enlightened (may God -- may He be exalted -- ennoble them both!), and of the mostly holy among the dominions and districts, the noble Jerusalem deserving to be honored and the throne of Egypt, being the prodigy of the epoch of the provinces of Yemen, Aden, Sana'a, Saba', and Ethiopia, of Baghdad the abode of peace, of Basra and Lahsa, of the cities of Anushiruwān [Khosrow I, Sasanian king], of the island of Rhodes, of the provinces of Rum, Tripoli, and Shahrizat, of well-protected Constantinople which afflicts the kings with nostalgia,

Of the island of Cyprus and of Algiers, Tunis, and other countries of the Maghreb, and of the area of holy war and combat, of the Kipchak steppe, of the Tatar country, of Diyarbakir, Kurdistan, Erzurum, Childir, Van, Azerbaijan, Georgia, of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and the whole of Rumelia, Anatolia, Karaman, Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, Hungary, Bosnia, and Hungarian countries,

And in addition, many other prosperous provinces and unlimited byways, fortresses reaching the heavens and buildings of multiple benefits, conquered and subjugated with the overwhelming power and superior force of my noble fathers and magnificent grandfathers (may God illuminate their graves!), and the one, who commands over the cities and countries of numerous emperors of dignity and enthroned sultans,

His excellency the sultan, son of the sultan, Sultan Mustafa Khan, son of Sultan Mehmed Khan, son of Sultan Murad Khan, son of Sultan Selim Khan, son of Sultan Suleiman Khan [the Magnificent].

Tughra_of_Mustafa_I.JPG

Far better than whatever the hoaxers made up.
 
Surprised nobody has mentioned one of the most famous titled historical figures: Alexander the Great
--Basileus of Macedon
--Hegemon of the Hellenic League
--Strategos Autokrator (Absolute General) of All Greece
--Pharaoh of Egypt
--Shah of Persia
--King of Kings
--Lord of All Asia (admittedly, a fair number of these were inherited from the Persian imperial titles)


And the Roman Emperor as an office had a fair number of titles as well:
--First Citizen (princeps)
--Revered One (augustus)
--Consular Imperator
--Censor in Perpetuity
--Tribunician in Perpetuity
--Father of the Country (pater patriae)
--Divi filius (son of a god)
--Dominus (lord and god, although this came later)
And individual emperors had their own individual honorifics: Germanicus, Optimus, Gothicus, Pius, Felix, Invictus, Restitutor Orbis, Maximus, Africanus, etc.

And the most notorious and longest Roman title (as mentioned earlier in the thread): Imperator Caesar Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius
He deserved all of this.
 
I'm not sure : Provence is quite similar on this regard, and while it happened differently in Northern France, the privatisation of counties and duchies seems to have happened in roughly the same time at the exception of titles directly tied to royal authority such as Dux Francorum. I'd be interested on what @Carp have to say about privatisation of counties and duchies or marches in Italy

Eh... early medieval Italian titles are not very consistent. In general, the Frankish conquest led to a shift from the Lombard dux to the Carolingian marchio among the provincial rulers of (northern) Italy, but there are so many exceptions to this rule that it hardly counts as a rule. Generally speaking, dux existed only where it was inherited from pre-Carolingian times; the new feudal creations in Lombardy in the late 9th/10th centuries were all marches (Ivrea, Turin, Milan, Western and Eastern Liguria, etc.). Friuli, previously a Lombard duchy, became a march ruled by a marchio, although Eberhard Unruoching was nevertheless described as "Duke of the March of Friuli." Tuscany likewise went from duchy to march, but the margraves of Tuscany were especially prone to compounding titles; the Bonifacii, who had begun as mere counts of Lucca, came to title themselves as "Count and Duke of Lucca and Margrave of Tuscany" or thereabouts. Marchio alone was favored thereafter, but the temporary union of Tuscany (a march) and Spoleto (a duchy) under Humbert Bosonid and (after an interruption) his son Hugh was probably the reason for the adoption of dux et marchio, a joint title which was apparently not abandoned even after Tuscany and Spoleto went their separate ways, such that Hugh's successors and the Canossa rulers of Tuscany in the 11th century still used dux et marchio (although apparently Matilda of Canossa preferred the simpler title of Countess of Tuscany). Spoleto held on to its Lombard-era distinction as a duchy, probably because it was on the Carolingian periphery and part of the southern Lombard sphere where dux and princeps were preferred and marchio was rare. Like Tuscany, however, dux et marchio became preferred because of the conglomeration of the rather insignificant March of Camerino with the Duchy of Spoleto. Complicating matters is the fact that the use of titles was not even consistent for individual people, who might be called comes in one source and given a totally different style in another.

In other words, these titles had no fixed meaning or hierarchy (or at least none that can be discerned), save perhaps for a generally observed superiority of dux, marchio, and comes palatii over a "mere" comes (although comes was nevertheless sometimes paired with these other titles, particularly that of marchio). Rather, titles tended to be used based on tradition and the personal ambitions and whims of their bearers. One sometimes gets the impression that dux had an implication of autonomy not shared by marchio, perhaps because of the pre-Carolingian provenance of dux, but there is little reason to believe that marchio was viewed as a strictly inferior title, particularly given the frequency with which the two were paired. I have read arguments before that comes, dux, and marchio were ill-defined and overlapping terms that nevertheless had slightly different implications and associations, and thus Italian lords tended to accumulate and use them together to emphasize the totality of their power, but if so the nuances attached to these titles are hard for us to know. Nor, with the possible exception of comes palatii (a relatively uncommon honor which sometimes - but not always - corresponds with proximity to or favor from the king/emperor), were they differentiated in terms of their ties to royal authority. The fact that the relatively obscure 10th century lords of Ravenna titled themselves dux, for instance, does not appear to have distinguished them much from their neighbors in terms of their status, obligations, or links to royal authority. It seems likely to me that the style was merely a holdover from the Byzantine presence at Ravenna, much like the nearby Duke of Venice, although the weakness of royal control in Romagna in general may have also had something to do with it.
 
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"... at all times augmentor of the empire ..." from the German title of the Holy Roman Emperor (zu allen Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs). It was of course a mistranslation of the Latin title SEMPER AVGVSTVS, based on the assumption that augustus was derived from the verb augere, i.e. to augment.
 
"... at all times augmentor of the empire ..." from the German title of the Holy Roman Emperor (zu allen Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs). It was of course a mistranslation of the Latin title SEMPER AVGVSTVS, based on the assumption that augustus was derived from the verb augere, i.e. to augment.
The assumption that it's derived from augere is roughly correct (more accurately both are derived from the same root), it's the meaning that's wrong. One of the meanings is to honour.
Augustus ~ One who is honoured.
 
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