Charlemagne and later \"Roman\" emperors

[Robert Vermaat]

It may be relevant to note that Greek speaking Romans (of whatever period) did not use "imperator" or anything derived from it, but rather called their ruler "Vasilefs" (Βασιλεύς), which is simply the word for "King". So it would be a serious bit of digging to get some impression of what they meant by whatever term they applied to such upstarts.

Not only the Greeks speakers did that: I know that during the 5th century and later, the Latin words for the emperors could be 'rex' as well as 'imperator' and 'augustus'.