Podestà

Podestà (Italian: [podeˈsta]), also potestate or podesta in English, was the name given to the holder of the highest civil office in the government of the cities of central and northern Italy during the Late Middle Ages.

The podestà's office, its duration and the residence and the local jurisdiction were called podesteria, especially during the Middle Ages, and in later centuries, more rarely during the Fascist regime.

There is a similar derivation for the Arabic term سلطان sulṭān, originally meaning 'power' or 'authority'; it eventually became the title of the person holding power.

[3] Leander Albertus gives the particulars: The citizens, seeing that there often arose among them quarrels and altercations, whether from favoritism or friendship, from envy or hatred that one had against another, by which their republic suffered great harm, loss and detriment; therefore, they decided, after much deliberation, to provide against these disorders.

Although the Emperor's experiment was short-lived, the podestà soon became important and common in northern Italy, making their appearance in most communes around the year 1200, with an essential difference.

The podestà exercised the supreme power in the city, both in peace and war, and in foreign and domestic matters alike; but their term of office lasted only about a year.

[6] In order to avoid the intense strife so common in Italian civic life, it soon became the custom to hire a stranger to fill this position.

It provided a self-contained lodging round its own interior court for the podestà, separate but housed within the Palazzo Pubblico where the councillors and their committee of nine habitually met.

'captain of the people') was chosen to look after the interests of the lower classes (to this day, the heads of government of the little independent republic of San Marino are still called "capitani").

In February 1926, Mussolini's Senate issued a decree which abolished the autonomous powers and functions of comuni (municipalities), including elected town councils and mayors.

In the Domini di Terraferma that the dogal Republic of Venice gradually established in the basin of the river Po, annexing various former principalities and self-governing cities, mostly in the fifteenth century, podesteria (Venetian: podestarie) were one of the intermediate levels of the hierarchical administrative organization, the highest ("provincial") level being the territorio (roughly a modern administrative region).

Thus in East Frisia, there were podestà identical in name and functions to those of the Italian republics; sometimes each province had one, and sometimes the federal diet elected a podestà-general for the whole country, the term of office being for a limited period or for life.