The contributions to this volume, which are based on numerous case studies from Asia, Egypt, and Europe, aim to overcome the rigorous opposition of personality and transpersonality and thus the postulate of a pre-modern rulership that has been considered to hinge almost exclusively on the ruler's person by emphasizing the coexistence and concurrency of pre-modern rulership's personal and transpersonal elements. Moreover, they discuss the ideas, values and norms which determined the respective contemporary models of the 'good' ruler and formed the basis for the concrete exercise of rule. As a third issue, they also focus on the interaction of the ruler with the elites, whereby processes of consensus-building and legitimization of the ruler's power, as well as the dynamics of their questioning and loss, become tangible.