While scholars working on high and late medieval England and France have long been emphasising the significance of kings and their chanceries as driving forces for the use of the written word in administrative matters, scholars dealing with the Empire have painted a different picture: pragmatic literacy was first deployed by the towns, then by the magnates and lastly by the kings. This view, however, created a blind spot for the impact kings might have had on the activities of princely chanceries. This article addresses this theme by focussing on the subject of princely rank. In so doing it investigates when kings started issuing charters concerning the promotions to princely rank or dealing with the hierarchy among the princes. It then looks at the representation of such documents in princely cartularies by analysing the earliest cartularies of the counts palatine of the Rhine and the counts / dukes of Jülich respectively. It can be shown that these charters occupied a central position and may even have been the reason for the creation of the cartularies; they were key to the manifestation of princely rank. As a result, the idea that princely rank derived from the king - an idea the king himself was eager to promote in his charters - was enshrined in and communicated by these princely cartularies. These cartularies, therefore, did not paint an image of autonomous princely authority, but on the contrary, they portray a hierarchically ordered community of king and princes. In such a way the cartularies made their own small contribution to creating and maintaining the long-lasting idea of the Empire as a political configuration represented by the king and the princes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]