which they speak. Andrea Dandolo,[g] the most authentic among them, describes in the following words the attributes of the first Venetian dukes: “They had,” says the doge chronicler, “the power and right to convoke the general meeting for public affairs, to appoint tribunes and judges to administer all matters private, lay, and ecclesiastical, save the mere spiritual; they had power in everything befitting the title of duke; and by their orders there the councils of the clergy took place and the election to the prelature was made by the clergy and the people, the election and the investiture being from their hands, as they had the power of appointment.” It is very doubtful whether the ducal attributes were originally so defined in detail. Anyhow, from the appearance of a military magistrate with the title of master of the militia alongside of the first duke, it can be inferred that the jurisdiction of the duke was limited to civil affairs. For the chronicler Giovanni,[h] in speaking of Paoluccio Anafesto, says that he judged his own with temperate justice. And here the verb to judge is used in a more definite and proper sense than in that used by the Lombard histories and documents respecting their dukes. It expresses that which is solely civil jurisdiction, whilst the jurisdiction of the Lombard dukes included the military jurisdiction as well as the civil. We have an important document of the dogedom of Anafesto,[i] which shows how beneficial the institution of the ducal power was to the Venetians. This document is a convention of the doge with Liutprand, by which the Lombard king conceded to the Venetians the trade of the territories of the kingdom proper, and, defining the limits between the two states, it declared to be Venetian the territories between the Piave Major and the Piavicelli on the side of Heraclea. Such, according to the chronicler Giovanni, was the tenor of the treaty of peace concluded between Liutprand and the first doge of Venice. And we have authentic confirmation of its truth in its verification, made by Barbarossa in the year 1177, of that which pertained to the designation of the Venetian confines on the part of Italy.[c] It was in 809 [or 810], in a war against Pepin, son of Charlemagne, that the Venetians made choice of the Island of the Rialto, near which they assembled their fleet bearing their wealth, and built the city of Venice, the capital of their republic. Twenty years afterward they transported thither from Alexandria the body of St. Mark, the evangelist, their chosen patron. His lion figured in their arms, and his name in their language whenever they would designate with peculiar affection their country or government. VENICE IN THE TENTH CENTURY [Sidenote: [900-996 A.D.]]