Roman _curia_. They find evidence of the continuance of old
boundaries, of many old names and many old executive functions, and
fail to appreciate that the principle which lay back of and was making
use of these old forms as convenient channels for the expression of
its power and of its control, was an entirely new one, based on ideas
fundamentally opposed to those of the civilization it had conquered.
This slight warning is necessary so as to avoid any error in the
conception of the significance to be attached to the geographical
limits of the divisions of territory we are considering.

The word _civitas_ has the same signification as _comitatus_, when
that word was used with the meaning of a territorial division; and
included all the territory, with its lands, its villages, its
fortified places and its city, which came under the jurisdiction of a
_dux_ or _judex_, or in Frankish times of a count, when we are
strictly justified in giving it the more familiar name of _county_.
From this we trace the Italian word _contado_, by the steps _comitatu,
comitato, contato, contado_. The land division here indicated is
indifferently called in the Lombard records _territorium, fines,
civitas_, or _judiciaria_. The identity of all these terms admits of
easy proof from all the documents, public and private; and numberless
instances could be cited showing an interchange of terms in describing
the same locality.

I will mention in illustration of this fact the rather neat example of
a document of the year 762, published by Brunetti[13] in his Codice
Diplomatico Toscano, in which three of these terms are used
interchangeably in the space of a few lines. It is a contract by which
a certain Arnifrid, an inhabitant of Clusium--the modern Chiusi--who
"in clusino territorio ... natus fuit," pledges himself to live on a