Duchy of Amalfi

The Duchy of Amalfi, also known as the Republic of Amalfi, was a de facto independent state centred on the southern Italian city of Amalfi during the tenth and eleventh centuries. The city had belonged to the larger Duchy of Naples, but in 839 it freed itself from Lombard domination and elected its own prefects, and in 958 it elected its first duke. Amalfi became a commercial powerhouse whose merchants dominated Mediterranean trade in the ninth and tenth centuries, linking Byzantium, the Fatimid Caliphate, North Africa and the Levant. Its population was estimated at fifty to seventy thousand, its ships carried chestnuts, grain, cloth and slaves, and its sailors and merchants left hostels and churches in Constantinople, Jerusalem and Antioch. The city's independence ended in 1073, when Robert Guiscard took Amalfi for the Normans; later revolts were crushed, and in 1137 Pisa sacked the city. Its maritime code and its compass-making tradition survived long after its political power had gone.