This measure simply indicates the character of the opinions which were received at the time in Europe, as well as the strong consciousness on the part of the patriarch, and those who acted with him, of the expediency of throwing the voice and countenance of the Church into the scale alike against the tribunitial oligarchy and against local jealousies and prejudices.  There was perhaps in this case the additional inducement that the proposal to invest the doge with supreme power and jurisdiction over the Church, as well as over the state, might seem to involve an indirect surrender, either now or hereafter, on the part of the Holy See of some of its power, as a high-priest or grand pontiff, who was also a secular prince, might prove less pliant than an ordinary liegeman of the Church.  But the men of 697 acted, as we must allow, sagaciously enough, when they presented their young country to the consideration of the papacy as possessing a party of order, into which the Church entered, and from which it now stood conspicuously and courageously out to take this very momentous initiative.

The creation of an ecclesiastical system had been one of the foremost aims of the first founders, who discerned in the transplantation of the churches of the terra firma, and their familiar pastors to the islands the most persuasive reconcilement of the fugitives to a hard and precarious lot; and after all the intervening years it was the elders of the Church who once more stepped forward and delivered their views on the best plan for healing discord, and making life in the lagoons tolerable for all.  They sought some system of rule, after trying several, which would enable them to live in peace at home, and to gain strength to protect themselves from enemies.  They would have been the most far-seeing of human beings if they had formed a suspicion of what kind of superstructure they were laying on the foundation.  The nearest model for their adoption or imitation was the Lombard type of government almost under their very eyes; and so far as the difference of local postulates suffered, it was that to which they had recourse, when they vested in their new chieftain undivided jurisdiction, but primarily military attributes and a title then 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.