Stephen du Perche (1137 or 1138 – 1169) was the chancellor of the Kingdom of Sicily (1166–68) and Archbishop of Palermo (1167–68) during the early regency of his cousin, the queen dowager Margaret of Navarre (1166–71).
Coincidentally, Stephen was at that moment preparing to go on crusade to the Holy Land and so decided to visit Palermo, the capital of Sicily, for a few months.
His chancellorship was noted, according to Hugo Falcandus, in that "he never allowed powerful men to oppress their subjects, nor ever feigned to overlook any injury done to the poor.
In that year as well, Henry, Count of Montescaglioso, the queen's brother, returned from the peninsula on the counsel of his friends, who had goaded him into making a complaint to his sister about the rank of Stephen.
Most of the Moslem staff of the palace and the eunuchs were involved in the plots and, on 15 December, Stephen promptly moved the court to Messina, to where he had implored his nephew Gilbert, Count of Gravina, to go with an army.
The plotters, led by Matthew of Ajello and Gentile, Bishop of Agrigento, went to Messina, but Henry, for reasons unknown, gave them up to a local judge.
But, though the Arabs of Palermo had been soothed, the Messinan Greeks had been riled by the past months and a rebellion consequently broke out in that city (on account of the criminal practices of one of Stephen's friends, Odo Quarrel).
After Henry's arrival in Messina, Odo was arrested and brutally executed and all the Frenchmen of the city massacred: an inglorious prelude to the more widespread Sicilian Vespers of 1282.
Stephen prepared an army (largely of Lombards from the region of Etna) and was ready to march on Messina when the young king postponed the campaign on astrological grounds.