Caesar

In snobbish Europe, a mere duke or king would not do. Great empires desired great titles for their sovereigns and what word would be better than Caesar, the name of the man who had once ruled the whole world?

Gaius Julius Caesar (100 BC – 44 BC) was predestined to achieve great things. According to the family legend, his predecessors were mythical heroes and gods, both supernaturally strong and intelligent. These two characteristics coalesced in Caesar who distinguished himself first as a military commander and later as a statesman, transforming the Roman Republic into an authoritarian empire. His rule stretched from the British Isles to North Africa, and who knows what other lands he would have conquered, had it not been for his envious friends who literally stabbed him in the back.

Even though Caesar became a despised figure during his reign, all subsequent Roman rulers titled themselves after his name. This tradition was later inherited by some European monarchs who built their own dominions on the ruins of the Roman Empire. Among them were Russian rulers – czars (tsars) – that believed it was their destination to turn Moscow into the third Rome, the second being Byzantium (now Constantinople) until it had fallen to the Turks in the 15th century.

The word czar (Slavic tsesari for Caesar) came to the English language in 1555. To quote the Oxford English Dictionary: “the word was so spelt by Herberstein, Rerum Moscovit. Commentarii, 1549, the chief early source of knowledge as to Russia in Western Europe, whence it passed into the Western Languages generally.” The same source notes, however, that since the 19th century most English journalists and authors have been using the French form, “tsar.”

When in 1871 numerous German states formed one country, Prussian King Wilhelm I assumed the title kaiser. The word – like Slavic tsesari – derives from Caesar, which in Old High German was spelled as keisur. Long before Germany was unified, the crowned heads of the Holy Roman Empire (962-1806) and its successor, Austria, titled themselves kaisers in memory of Roman emperors. However, it wasn't until Wilhelm II – dubbed Kaiser Bill by the British during World War I – that the word “kaiser” became popular in the English language.

As Wilhelm II was rather a controversial person, the word kaiser began to symbolize authoritarian, often erratic, individuals. In its 1923 report from Germany, Time rhetorically asked: “Does a Christ preach a creed of peace on earth, good will to men, some Kaiser will pervert his words into 'Gott mit Uns.' [God is with us].” Ten years later, Adolf Hitler was elected the chancellor and fuhrer.

The times of kaisers, tsars, and emperors are fortunately gone. The last one, Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, died in a military coup in 1974, and few cried after him. What he and others hardly ever realized was that deeds, not titles, guarantee immortality.