The main authority is C. Schlegel, the historian of the Dresden superintendents (1698), summarized by H. W. Rotermund, in the additions (1810) to Jöcher, _Gelehrten-Lexicon_ (1750). (A. Go.*)
LAURIA (LURIA or LORIA) ROGER DE (d. 1305), admiral of Aragon and Sicily, was the most prominent figure in the naval war which arose directly from the Sicilian Vespers. Nothing is really known of his life before he was named admiral in 1283. His father was a supporter of the Hohenstaufen, and his mother came to Spain with Costanza, the daughter of Manfred of Beneventum, when she married Peter, the eldest son and heir of James the Conqueror of Aragon. According to one account Bella of Lauria, the admiral's mother, had been the foster mother of Costanza. Roger, who accompanied his mother, was bred at the court of Aragon and endowed with lands in the newly conquered kingdom of Valencia. When the misrule of Charles of Anjou's French followers had produced the famous revolt known as the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, Roger de Lauria accompanied King Peter III. of Aragon on the expedition which under the cover of an attack on the Moorish kingdom of Tunis was designed to be an attempt to obtain possession of all or at least part of the Hohenstaufen dominions in Naples and Sicily which the king claimed by right of his wife as the heiress of Manfred. In 1283, when the island had put itself under the protection of Peter III. and had crowned him king, he gave the command of his fleet to Roger de Lauria. The commission speaks of him in the most laudatory terms, but makes no reference to previous military services.