AMALFI, ARCHDIOCESE OF. — In the Campania region, in the province of Salerno, it borders the dioceses of Sorrento and Nocera dei Pagani and Sarno, and numbers 37,108 inhabitants, all Catholics, 55 parishes, with 76 diocesan priests and 23 religious priests. Its patron is the apostle St. Andrea, whose relics, brought from Constantinople by Cardinal Pietro di Capua in 1208, are preserved and venerated in the Cathedral.
Already a bishopric from the 6th century, A. was raised to an archbishopric in 987; then, in 1818, after Pius VII suppressed the episcopal sees of Scala, Ravello, and Minori, their territory was incorporated with that of A., of which they had long been suffragans, together with the dioceses of Capri and Lettere. Two councils are said to have been held there by Nicola II, in 1048 or 1059; but the second, at which the Pontiff deposed the archbishop of Trani and granted Roberto il Guiscardo the investiture of Calabria and Apulia, was, more probably—as the Cassinese chronicler also states—held in Melfi.
The 9th century, which witnessed the rise of A.’s prosperity, flourishing through maritime activity, was rich in turbulent events, ranging from the bringing to the city, by Bishop Pietro, of the body of St. Trifomena, later taken away by the Beneventan prince Siccardo (833–38), to the participation of the Amalfitan ships in the battle against the Saracens in the waters of Ostia (849). Given the close relations between the two powers in A., a characteristic feature of the maritime cities of Campania, in 987 the doge Mansone III obtained from Pope Giovanni XV the elevation of the see to an archbishopric.
Once Amalfitan autonomy had been established in the first decades of the 9th century, its rivalry with the other maritime republics began; the vessels of the Campanian city sailed the Mediterranean, and its merchants dominated the centers and currents of trade. Around 1020, some Amalfitan negotiatores founded the celebrated hospital in Jerusalem, from which the Order of the Knights of St. John originated. A century later, A.’s glorious autonomy came to an end: in 1131, amid the Campanian and Apulian struggles in which the drama of the Church divided by schism was reflected (A. also took part in it: one of its archbishops, Giovanni «de Porta», was consecrated, probably in that same year, 1131, by Anacleto II, who had come to Salerno to settle the dispute between the archbishop Romualdo and the prince Roberto), Ruggero II forced the ancient republic to capitulate, annexing it to the newly established Norman kingdom. Nevertheless, the city’s slow but no less fatal decline did not prevent Normans and Swabians from enriching it with artistic monuments, even as the area of the city, threatened by the violence of the waters and by landslides, diminished.