en recognized as having, above all, a
military significance.

On the receipt of the desired reply, the patriarch lost no time in
calling on the national assembly to follow up their late vote to its
legitimate consequences; and the choice of the people fell on Pauluccio
Anafesto, a native of Heraclia, whose name occurs here for the first
time, but who may be supposed to have had some prominent share in
promoting the late revolution. Anafesto was conducted to a chair which
had been prepared for him in his parish church, and solemnly invested by
the metropolitan with the insignia of authority, one of which is said to
have been an ivory sceptre--a symbol and a material borrowed from the
Romans.

It is not an unusual misconception that this organic change in the
government involved the simultaneous extinction of the tribunitial
office and title. But the truth is that the tribunes continued to
exercise municipal and subordinate functions many generations after the
revolution of 697; each island of importance, such as Malamocco and
Equilo, had its own tribune, while of the smaller islands several
contributed to form a tribunate or governorship; and office, though
neither strictly nor properly hereditary, still preserved its tendency
to perpetuate itself in a limited number of families. It is only
subsequently to the twelfth century that less is heard of the tribunes;
and the progress of administrative reform led to the gradual
disappearance of this old feudal element in the constitution.

In the time of Anafesto, the larger islands of the _dogado_ formed the
seats of powerful factions; the disproportion in point of influence
between the Crown and the tribune of Malamocco or the tribune of Equilo
was but slightly marked; and the abolition of that magistracy was a much
more sweeping measure than the first makers of a doge would have dared
to propose.

The military complexion of the ducal authority was not confined to the
personal character of the supreme officer of state, for under him, not
as a novel element in the constitution, but as one which preexisted side
by side with the tribunitial system, served a _master of the soldiers_,
whom there is a fairly solid ground for regarding as second to the doge
or duke in precedence, and above the civil tribunes of the respective
townships.

To find in so small and imperfectly developed a state the two leading
functionaries or ingredients deriving their appellations from a command