They were abandoned by the Empire during Aurelian’s reign, but not in the common acceptance, by a sudden withdrawal of the legions and officials. This was only a practical and temporary concession to the threatened danger of invasion. The Emperors retained all political rights. The barbarians were tolerated in a province which was kept on the registers of the State, and they could figure as mere «foederati». But there was no Roman force to protect the citizens, and no German or Touranian king was interested in ruling over poor districts where the cities had vanished, over a population living on a patriarchal system. The «Romans» were forced to organise their life of purely popular lines; wholly free, subject only to patriarchal rule.
This is no isolated example. The campagne of Rome was a «Romania» at the end of the classic age, and the name of «Romagna» has clung to it to this day. The island of Sardinia was divided into small popular units. Venice, in its origin, was merely a miserable haunt of simple fishers obeying no rulers beyond their own humble chieftains. The South of Italy can show a long list of similar communities. So, too, the «Romanches» in the Alps, who call their language «Ladin».
The Danubian Romans, in their «Romaniae», recognized the supreme authority of the distant Emperor, the Imperator (the mbret of the half-Romanized Illyrians of Albania), but it was very seldom that they enjoyed the opportunity of seeing him. In their homes, therefore, they entrusted the first duties of administration to the «good old men» (oameni buni și bătrâni: homines boni et veterani) similar to the old senators of Venice. As in Sardinia, judges (Roum: juzi; sing.: jude) decided all matters of justice. In time of war, the territories of several judges combined in a duchy, under a duke, who bore the Slavonic
