TIL that the term podestá refers to an official hired from outside a community to come oversee administration duties, representing the first instance of a career politician.

From Max Weber's "The City":

Hanauer documented, for the fourth decade of the thirteenth century, seventy persons who had occupied two, and twenty who had held half a dozen or more different podestá positions. Often a man made a life-long career in such offices.

Podestás were hired from outside a community and brought with them auxiliary officials to govern communities in Italy. They were paid fixed salaries, rather than fees and taxes, and thus made much more money than the consuls of the time.