This is the domain of the viceroy. The Oxford MS. agrees with our text and reads
This is the domain of the king's garden. Chroniclers tell that when the young king was freed from the control of the viceroy he gave himself up to pleasure and dissipation. Asher is clearly wrong, because a mere boy could not have indulged in those frolics. The point is of importance, as it absolutely fixes the date of Benjamin's visit to the island. It was in the year 1177 that William married the daughter of our English king, Henry II.
Edrisi, who wrote his Geography in Sicily in 1154 at the request of King Roger II, calls the island a pearl, and cannot find words sufficient in praise of its climate, beauty, and fertility. He is especially enthusiastic concerning Palermo. Petralia is described by him as being a fortified place, and an excellent place of refuge, the surrounding country being under a high state of cultivation and very productive. Asher has no justification for reading Pantaleoni instead of Petralia.
The passage in square brackets is to be found in most of the printed editions, as well as in the Epstein (E) MS., which is so much akin to them, and is comparatively modern. The style will at once show that the passage is a late interpolation, and the genuine MSS. now forthcoming omit it altogether.
See Aronius, Regester, p. 131. This writer, as a matter of course, had only the printed editions before him. His supposition that
