Prologue

Summary

THE TITLE ‘ADMIRAL OF ADMIRALS’ was an actual honorific first applied in 1133 by King Roger II of Sicily in its Latin form (amiratus amiratorum) to his gifted adviser, George of Antioch. Amiratus was derived from the Arabic word amir (‘emir’), literally meaning ‘commander’. In other words, King Roger used the title to designate George as a ‘commander of commanders’. At the time, however, the designation carried no naval connotation. George of Antioch was the king's ‘minister of ministers’ in the sense of a ‘first minister’ or ‘prime minister’, responsible for the overall, day-to-day functioning of government. It was only when the ‘amiratus’ successfully exploited the royal fleet to extend the power of the crown beyond the boundaries of the kingdom that the position began to take on a maritime aspect. The appellation ‘admiral’ did not become fully identified with command of the fleet until 1177 when Roger's grandson, King William II of Sicily, bestowed the dignity regii fortunati stolii amiratus (‘Admiral of the Blessed Royal Fleet’) on his first minister, Walter of Moac. But none in all of the Middle Ages deserved the distinction ‘Admiral of Admirals’ in the sense of a supreme naval commander more than Roger of Lauria who fought for the Crown of Aragon during the War of the Sicilian Vespers in the late thirteenth century.

Revered maritime historian John Pryor offers no caveats when he insists that Lauria, a Calabrian noble, ‘has no rival in medieval history, not even among the Genoese and the Venetians’. ‘He was one of the greatest naval commanders in the history of the Mediterranean,’ panegyrizes David Abulafia in The Great Sea. He called him the ‘new Lysander’, referring to the renowned Spartan navarch (‘leader of ships’) who humbled Athens at the Battle of Notium in 407 BC and again at Aegospotami in 404 before eventually forcing the rival city-state to terms with the blockade of Piraeus – thus ending the Peloponnesian War. Roger of Lauria is immortalized in both Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. To place him in proper perspective, his career should be compared to that of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson who won three pitched battles at sea as a fleet commander: the Battle of the Nile in 1798, the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 and, of course, the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.