The coming of the Norman ruled that these lands should be neither Saracen nor Greek, nor yet Italian in the same sense as northern Italy, but that they should politically belong to the same group of states as the kingdoms and principalities of feudal Europe.
A city occupying approximately the same site had been the capital of one of the principalities into which China was divided some centuries before the Christian era; and during the reigns of the two Tatar dynasties that immediately preceded the Mongols in northern China, viz.
Having become despots, the popes sought to establish their relatives in principalities.
We know from the Assyrian inscriptions that just at the time which Herodotus assigns to Deioces the Medes were divided into numerous small principalities and subjected to the great Assyrian conquerors.
He became secretary of the embassy in London; was employed on special missions in the principalities and at St Petersburg (1848), and was sent to Egypt as special commissioner in 1851.