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PhilGoetz comments on Exploitation and cooperation in ecology, government, business, and AI - Less Wrong
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Feudalism is hierarchical. Vladimir is talking about the high level of autonomy of each boss in the hierarchy. Even kings did not have the absolute power we usually think of kings as having; the Holy Roman Empire being an extreme example of this, in which IIRC the Emperor was usually less powerful than any of his immediate subordinates, and served more as a balancing force or referee than as a supreme ruler.
I think that it's not so much whether you remember correctly as which emperor you mean. The HRE lasted for nearly 1000 years, and the power of emperor varied a lot over this time.
To make things even more complicated, besides their imperial title, Holy Roman emperors typically had a whole bunch of titles over different lands within the Empire (and sometimes even outside of it), whose significance in terms of actual control ranged from purely theoretical to very real. Their ability to assert their imperial authority across the Empire heavily depended, among other things, on the ability to draw resources from the specific lands they controlled more tightly.