Peter Stewart, University of Western Australia

There have been several posts over the past year with ancestor tables including Rogerio di Loria, Grand Admiral of Aragon, which give a birth date around 1260 but take his line no farther back.

Given the extravagant fixation in some quarters with every skerrick of Plantagenet ancestry, the following may be of interest even at third hand:

In the entry for Loria in his "Dictionnaire Historique et Généalogique des Grands Familles de Grèce, d'Albanie et de Constantinople" (Paris 1983), Mihail-Dmitri Sturdza says the admiral was born at La Scalea in Calabria around 1250 and died at Valence in Feb 1305, having married twice and fathered ten legitimate offspring along with at least one illegitimate son. His first wife Margarita, a sister of Corrado di Lancia and niece of king
Manfred, was mother of Ilaria who married Enrico Sanseverino, count of Marsico and constable of Sicily (they are well-known to this group as ancestors of Elizabeth Wydvill). The admiral's second wife was Saurina d'Enteça, apparently sp as she was endowed with the barony of Cocentaïna which passed in turn to several of her step-children.

The admiral's father is given as another Roger di Loria, living in the mid-twelfth century, a minor nobleman in the entourage of king Manfred, and his mother as Bella d'Amichi. She was nurse and then governess to Constanza di Benevento, born in 1249 (Roger is described as her "suckling-brother", hence his suggested birth date). Mother and son accompanied the princess to Aragon in 1262 for her fateful marriage to the future king Pedro III.

Sources cited for this information are:

F Campanile, "L'Armi overo l'insegne dei nobili" (Naples 1610), pp 67-71
A Rubio y Liuch, "Diplomatari del l'Orient català" (Barcelona 1947)
J Gramunt, "Los linajes catalanes en Grecia en el siglo XIV" (Hidalguia
1957)
M Merce Costa, article "Lloria" in La Gran Enciclopedia Catalana
PF Palumbo, "Contributi alla storia dell'età di Manfredi (Rome 1959)

Can anyone confirm this parentage from primary sources, add to it, or
otherwise offer comment?

Peter Stewart

Posted on soc.genealogy.medieval.
Riviera dei Cedri.NET exoress gratitude to Peter Steward for the permission of publishing