He maintained his reputation and was uniformly successful in his battles at sea, but they were not always fought for the defence of Sicily. The death of Peter III. in 1286 and of his eldest son Alphonso in the following year caused a division among the members of the house of Aragon. The new king, James, would have given up Sicily to the Angevine line with which he made peace and alliance, but his younger brother Fadrique accepted the crown offered him by the Sicilians, and fought for his own hand against both the Angevines and his senior. King James tried to force him to submission without success. Roger de Lauria adhered for a time to Fadrique, but his arrogant temper made him an intolerable supporter, and he appears, moreover, to have thought that he was bound to obey the king of Aragon. His large estates in Valencia gave him a strong reason for not offending that sovereign. He therefore left Fadrique, who confiscated his estates in Sicily and put one of his nephews to death as a traitor. For this Roger de Lauria took a ferocious revenge in two successive victories at sea over the Sicilians. When the war, which had become a ravening of wild beasts, was at last ended by the peace of Calatabellota, Roger de Lauria retired to Valencia, where he died on the 2nd of January 1305, and was buried, by his express orders, in the church of Santas Creus, a now deserted monastery of the Cistercians, at the feet of his old master Peter III. In his ferocity, and his combination of loyalty to his feudal lord with utter want of scruple to all other men, Roger belonged to his age. As a captain he was far above his contemporaries and his successors for many generations.
Signor Amari's _Guerra del Vespro Siciliano_ gives a general picture of these wars, but the portrait of Roger de Lauria must be sought in the _Chronicle_ of the Catalan Ramon de Muntaner who knew him and was formed in his school. There is a very fair and well "documented" account of the masterly campaign of 1285 in Charles de la Roncière's _Histoire de la marine française_, i. 189-217. (D. H.)
LAURIA, or LORIA, a city of Basilicata, Italy, in the province of Potenza, situated near the borders of Calabria, 7½ m. by road S. of Lagonegro. Pop. (1901) 10,470. It is a walled town on the steep side of a hill with another portion in the plain below, 1821 ft. above sea-level. The castle was the birthplace of Ruggiero di Loria, the great Italian admiral of the 13th century. It was destroyed by the French under Masséna in 1806.