Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/179

 in detail the forms of this modest but highly interesting village organisation. Although the public functions were usually held by a small number of elected officers, a popular assembly, an adunare or sbor (this latter being the Slavonic term) was invariable. Most of the Italian cities were ruled by senators after the Byzantine system, the new Roman system established by Justinian on the ruins of the Gothic domination. Historically Gothic rule in Italy was itself a simple vassal state of the Empire, entrusted to the German chief, who was a ruler over his own tribe, which acknowledged the Emperor as the supreme overlord: Theodoric was an exarch, an imperial delegate and, by this only, the theoretical chief of all Italy — a position of undoubted inferiority to that of the present day viceroy of India, who rules the British provinces and controls the autonomous Rajah states. Besides the senators and the exercitus or army, which cooperated freely with the Imperial and popular authorities, were the magistrates or indices, whose title was hellenised in the Southern province as kritai. In Venice the Byzantine duke, the later Doge, came to wield an authority superior to all judges; in Rome, the Pope destroyed the power of his civil rivals; in Southern Italy, the judges persisted until the arrival of the Normans; Sardinia, until the close of the Middle Ages, was divided into giudicature.

The case was similar on the Danube, where, owing to different circumstances, the earlier abandonment by the Romans being the chief cause, the judge appeared as early as the second half of the 4th century. He was master, not of Roman colonists, but of Goths who had no other chieftain than this index Thervingorum, Athanarich by name. The title is not to be found in any other part of the original German civilisation: the Germans of all branches were