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 and control over the rude feudal militia, might alone warrant the conclusion that the most essential requirement of Venice, even when it had so far modified the form of administration, was felt to be the possession, under responsible direction, of a means of securing internal order and withstanding external aggression, if it were not the case that from the Gothic era onward we hear of scholae militiae cum patronis, manifestly the schools of instruction for the body over which the magister militum presided.  These seminaries existed in the days of the exarch Narses, generations before a doge was given to Venice.  Yet, through all the time which has now elapsed since the first erection of a separate political jurisdiction, not only the Church, on which such stress was at the very outset laid, but a civil government, and regulations for trade and shipping, must have been active forces, always tending to grow in strength and coherence.