Okay, there's more to it. A kingdom is a realm ruled by a king or queen (the terms are closer in medieval Latin than they are in English, rex and regina, and a realm is a regnum). An empire is a collection of different countries/kingdoms/realms, all under one central imperial power, emperor or empress.
For the purposes of medieval Europe, the model for empire was the Roman Empire. Interestingly, Rome had assembled an empire, conquering countries and territories all around the Mediterranean, while it was still officially a republic, run by the Senate and the "people," SPQR (Senatus populusque Romae, "the Senate and people of Rome"). By the first century BC, however, Rome acquired emperors, first Julius Caesar and then his nephew and successor Augustus Caesar. Emperors soon became god-like absolute rulers (they also tended to be assassinated with some frequency, starting with Julius Caesar).
As I've discussed earlier, the Roman emperors moved permanently to Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the fourth century, though there were sometimes separate co-emperors in western Europe for another 150 years or so. But when the pope crowned Charlemagne Roman emperor in 800, it was the beginning of a separate, western line of emperors that lasted throughout the Middle Ages. This empire was called the Holy Roman Empire (at least by the emperors and their aids) from the twelfth century on.
This evolved in the post-medieval period into the great Spanish empire that took over most of Latin America (except Brazil and a few small territories) and eventually became the Austro-Hungarian empire, that lasted until World War I. When Hitler announced that he was founding a "Third Reich" (third empire), he was looking at the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire as the first two.
The medieval empire (Holy Roman Empire) included three countries, Germany, Burgundy, and Italy, so it meets the definition of an empire containing separate countries (it also had pieces of some other ones). In practice, the emperors were also German kings, though they had to go to Rome to be crowned emperor. Their control over Italy was tenuous at best; medieval Italy was made up of a number of small city-states and principalities, and they had no interest in being run by the German king. Burgundy had stopped being an independent country in the early eleventh century, when the German king married the heiress. This now-forgotten kingdom of Burgundy was centered in the Jura, between modern France and Switzerland, and headed south toward the Mediterranean along the valley of the Rhône.
One often sees reference to a "Norman empire." The dukes of Normandy became kings of England as well in 1066. Other Normans (not the dukes) established their rule in Sicily and southern Italy in the early eleventh century, becoming first dukes and then kings of the region. This was not however a real empire, because Normandy, which remained under the kings of England from 1066 to 1214, was part of France, and France was not under the English king, as the French king would have explained if you had any doubts.
Great Britain today is in some ways an empire, in that the three kingdoms on the island (England, Wales, and Scotland) are all under one monarch, now Elizabeth II. But they are officially not an empire, but rather a "united kingdom." They have been so since the king of Scotland became king of England as well in the seventeenth century. The Irish are probably the most "imperial" part now. Officially it's the "United Kingdom of Great Britain [GB being the island with the three kingdoms] and northern Ireland."
In the nineteenth century, however, when "the sun never set on the British Empire," the British king or queen was also emperor/empress of areas from Australia and Hong Kong and India to Canada. No medieval king or emperor ever had anything as broad as either the British Empire or the early-modern Spanish Empire.
© C. Dale Brittain 2020
For more on emperors and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.
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