The Kingdom of Sicily: the very use of this title implies the existence of a political unit that possessed a specifically Sicilian identity, founded on continuity of government, culture or population, or all of these. It was, according to one historian, a ‘model-state’ in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the sense that the Norman and Swabian kings governed the lives and affairs of their subjects with great precision and extensive controls, being blessed with a developed legislative sense that aimed to abstract and to apply a coherent series of juristic principles throughout their kingdom. To this extent ‘Kingdom of Sicily’ means the government of the kingdom and the activities of its rulers; the definition is only incidentally concerned with the actual domains over which the Normans and their heirs ruled. But as a territorial entity, the Regno was something more than Sicilian. In the twelfth and for most of the thirteenth century it comprised, in addition to the island of Sicily, the southern half of peninsular Italy – the modern provinces of Calabria, Basilicata (Lucania), Apulia, Campania, Molise and the Abruzzi, a well as the trading city of Gaeta (but not the small papal enclave at Benevento). At different moments the Regno was stretched to include towns in what are now Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, as well as parts of Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. Malta was incorporated into the Regno in 1127, but was first invaded by the Normans in 1090. Moreover, the northern land limits of the kingdom, slicing across the peninsula, were not clearly drawn and remained the subject of contention.