dred people or more, drawn from those families eligible for office, and a higher, executive committee of Priors who held office for two months and who were responsible for proposing legislation to the General Council and for formulating policy. The process of election to the priorate, as to most other offices, was extremely complex, and was indicative of the aspirations of the system. It consisted of a mixture of sortition or lot and selection, sometimes in extremely protracted combinations, to ensure that factions could not easily obtain control of the whole body. Short terms, 'syndication', or checking on the conduct of an official at the end of his term and fining him for shortcomings, restrictions on tenure of offices in combination or when relatives were in office, were all geared to the same purpose, and all were ultimately ineffective. In time the obvious weaknesses of the system--the need to consult widely, the difficulty of making rapid or confidential decisions--led to a further modification, the adoption of balìe or special committees with special powers and fewer rules about membership. These soon became the norm of government in those towns which remained republics.
Communal constitutions were all idealistic, and their citizens were forever falling short of those ideals. Compulsive tampering with the constitution and compulsive legislation are often signs that the mechanism is not working. In most towns, though, the system soon collapsed; not so much under the weight of its own bureaucracy or ideals, for much of that survived in altered form, but because for all its electoral niceties and its checks and balances it was no match for the brutally simpler system of 'seigneurial' government. The 'strong man' as palliative or replacement for independent government by committee appears already in the first half of the thirteenth century, when Uberto Pelavicini and Ezzelino da Romano, both protégés of Frederick II, rapidly carved out states for themselves in northern Italy. Their exceptional cruelty marks them as extreme manifestations of the old quarrels of the aristocracy rather than new-style rulers; but they are a foretaste of what was to come.
And yet the idealism of the communal phase makes it worth
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