646 RENAISSANCES

this argument remains unrefuted; and the formidable negative case
against the thesis that the Medieval Italian communes were derived
from the Ancient' Italian city-states without any breach of historical
continuity is confirmed by a positive consideration which would appear
to be conclusive.

In the Medieval Italian communes the civic magistrates bore the title
'consuls'; and the advocates of the thesis that a Medieval Italian civic
self-government goes back, without a break, to 'ancient' origins will be
hard put to it to explain how and why and when the cities of Italy had
come to adopt a piece of constitutional nomenclature which, in 'ancient*
times, had been foreign to all of them with the sole exception of Rome.
After Rome had made herself the queen of Italy and the rest of the
Hellenic World through the prowess of Roman armies led by Roman
consuls, no state-member of a Roman commonwealth of city-states
would ever have ventured to call its municipal magistrates 'consuls' in
lieu of the traditional local title, whatever this might happen to be. If
the civic institutions of the Medieval Italian communes had really been
handed down from days before the Roman conquest, then their supreme
magistrates would still have borne the title meddices tutici in ex-Oscan-
speaking communities and the title praetores or dictator in ex-Latin-
speaking communities. If their institutions had been of Roman origin,
then their magistrates would have been called duumviri or quattuorviri.
If they had dated from the last century of the Principate they would
have been called curator. If they had dated from the post-Diocletianic
Age they would have been called defensor cimtatis. But they could
never have been given the Roman title 'consuls' until the official aboli-
tion of the Roman Consulate by the Emperor Justinian in A.D. 541*
had become so immemorially old an accomplished fact that the term
had had time to fade out of the field of practical politics into an academic
limbo of historical memories. Then, and not till then, this term 'consul*
would have come to be at the disposal of any academic-minded con-
stitution-maker who might be attracted by it—and it would, of course,
possess the supreme attraction of being associated historically with
memories of the greatest age in the history of the most potent of all
Hellenic city-states.

This tell-tale internal evidence inherent in the history of the title
'consuls' is confirmed by external evidence testifying that, in the parts
of Italy conquered by the Lombards in and after A.D. 568, the last
vestiges of civic self-government were effaced by new institutions for
governing the cities through officers appointed by, and answerable to,
the kings and dukes who ruled over the Lombard successor-states of the
Constantinopolitan Roman Empire on Italian ground; and these new
Lombard royal and ducal officials in Italian cities bore such new titles
as 'counts', 'viscounts (locopositi)', missi, gastaldi, 'Schultheisse', indices^
decani. During the interval of four hundred years between the comple-
tion of the Lombard conquests and the rise of the Medieval Italian
city-states, the surviving contemporary documents and other records
show no trace of the currency either of the Medieval Italian title

1 See V. vi. in and 224.