Muriel's Mill under Latin Law in the Court of Roger II of Sicily, Palermo, 1123 AD

The authors use the first critical edition of the Greek record of a case involving the usurpation of a mill by Lady Muriel of Petterana, daughter of Count Roger I of Sicily, from the Muslim family that had held it before the Norman conquest of the island, and that was tried in the court of her half-brother Count Roger II, to investigate the process and surrounding circumstances. They argue that the record, issued more than thirty years after the conquest but seven years before the creation of the kingdom of Sicily, reveals that the young Roger II and his ministers were already concerned to demonstrate that he ruled not by force alone but rather by law, as judge and lawgiver to what the royal assizes promulgated more than seventeen years later were to call “the different peoples subject to his rule”, Greeks, Latins and Muslims.