AUXERRE. – Capital of the department of Yonne (France). Near the settlement of the Senonian Gauls, called Autricum, the Romans built a new city, Autessiodorum, equipped with temples, baths, walls, etc., which became an important center of communication with the north.
The most ancient documents for the history of the diocese of A. are the lives of St. Germano and St. Amatore: the former, attributed to the Lyonese presbyter Costanzo, has come down to us interpolated; the latter was commissioned from a presbyter Stefano by St. Aunacario toward the end of the sixth century. To the same period belongs a calendar containing the names of the bishops of A., inserted into the compilation of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum. The first bishop, Pellegrino, according to local tradition and the aforesaid martyrology, is honored as a martyr on 16 May; the third, Valeriano, mentioned in the biography of St. Amatore, appears in 346; the fifth, St. Amatore, died in 418, and a basilica was erected over his tomb shortly thereafter. The sixth, Germano, died at Ravenna in 448. Aunacario was the eighteenth; he died in 605. In his time, 8 km from A., there existed a monasterium Cociacense, erected, according to a tradition of the ninth century, near the place where many Christians fleeing from Besançon at the time of Aurelian were said to have been killed. There, Bishop Germano is said to have erected two churches, one over their tomb, the other at the place where the head of the most notable martyr of the group, St. Prisco, was found.
During the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, and especially toward the end of the twelfth century, through the work of Pietro di Courtenay,
until 1359, when the city was occupied by the English, abbeys and sacred buildings flourished in A.
Part of the crypt of the abbey church of St. Germano, adorned with Carolingian paintings from the ninth century, still remains. A new building was constructed above it in the thirteenth century. The cathedral was erected by Bishop Guglielmo di Seignelay (1215–34) on the remains of the earlier one, whose crypt survives beneath the present choir.
The abbey church of St. Eusebio, now a parish church, was built in the twelfth century; the choir dates from the Renaissance.
The church of the former Augustinian abbey of A., St. Pietro in Valle, dates from the sixteenth century. The Premonstratensian abbey of St. Mariano was demolished in 1570.
The Concordat of 1801 suppressed the dioceses of A. and Sens, forming the diocese of Troyes. The Concordat of 1817 reconstituted the diocese of A. But the bull of Pius VII, Paternae charitatis, of 10 October 1822, suppressed it once again, assigning its territory to the diocese of Sens. A brief of the same Pontiff, dated 3 June 1823, added to the archbishop of Sens the title of bishop of A.