ABSTRACT
Of all the registers of lands and men from Sicily in the Norman period, undoubtedly the most significant were those that recorded the enormous concessions to the church of Santa Maria Nuova in Monreale, 10 km to the south-west of Palermo. A royal privilege was issued to the newly-founded church on 15 August 1176 by King William II in which it was granted more than 1,200 km2 of the Val di Mazara with all its estates and men in perpetuity. Since the mid-ninth century, this part of western Sicily had been the densest zone of Muslim settlement. Indeed, it had remained so during the Norman period until the forced deportations of Muslims to Lucera on the Italian mainland in the mid-thirteenth century following the series of rebellions that began on William's death in 1189. In all, three registers were issued to Monreale between 1178 and 1183. Two were written in Arabic and Greek and recorded the names of the villeins who lived and worked on the donated estates. The third, a translation from Arabic to Latin, was issued on 15 May 1182, six years after the original donation had been made. 1 This comprised of 50 boundary definitions including the magnae divisae of Ğāṭū (Iato) and Qurulū n (Corleone) with their internal estates and the confines of Baṭṭallārū and Qal'at al-Ṭrāzī. 2
