Naturally enough, such internal discord laid the communities open to attacks from without; and the Slav pirates came sailing in their swift vessels from the Dalmatian coast, and gathered rich booty in the archipelago. In the face of a common danger home quarrels were once more forgotten, and the people of the islands met to consider the general safety. [Sidenote: _697-717 A.D._] It was soon decided that internal peace could only be maintained by electing a single leader over all, a Dux, a Duke, a Doge, and the first choice fell on Paulus Lucas Anafestus, of Heraclea. Each island was to preserve its own tribune, its own laws, and its own judges, if it had any, and the Doge was to meddle with nothing that did not concern the common welfare of the whole federation. Moreover, no measure proposed by him was to become law until the people had voted upon it in general assembly called the Arengo. Such was the remedy proposed, and in it lay the germ of the future form of government. But at first it produced a result the contrary of what was expected. The families of the different tribunes had envied and hated one another; they united to envy and hate the family of which the head was in power as Doge. [Sidenote: _Rom. i. 107._] A violent dispute between the partisans of Anafestus and those of the tribune of Equilio brought about the first conflict. Equilio was in part overgrown with pine-trees, and the angry adversaries met in the dusky grove and fought to the death; and it is recorded that the small canal, which drained the land under the trees, ran red that day, wherefore it was afterwards called ‘Archimicidium,’ which I take to mean ‘the beginning of killing’; but it is now the Canal Orfano, in which criminals were drowned during many centuries. That day was indeed the beginning of murder between the people of Equilio and those of Heraclea, and their hatred for each other was handed down afterwards from generation to generation, to our own times, so that even when the two islands were both included in the city of Venice, and both governed by the same municipal laws, the people still formed two hostile factions, of which more will be said hereafter. [Sidenote: _737-742 A.D._] After having elected three doges, the people concluded from the result that they had been mistaken in choosing such a form of government, and by common agreement the power was placed in the hands of a military head, who was called the Chief of Militia; but as this experiment proved a failure after a trial of five years, the federation went back to the election of a Doge.