Flight from Prosecution: The Search for Religious Asylum in Medieval Montpellier

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Although historical precedents and modern parallels exist, the institution of asylum reached its apogee in the Middle Ages.' This study will examine religious asylum in the commercial, financial, and university center of Montpellier in the early fourteenth century through the record of a municipal inquest of 1332 contained in a lengthy manuscript dossier from the Archives municipales de Montpellier.2 This document preserves testimony by contemporaries about religious asylum and the reaction of lay authorities to it. The inquest itself focused on the question of whether it was Montpellier practice to interrogate persons accused of crimes in religious houses where they sought asylum. Much of the interest of this evidence for historians lies in the incidental, yet otherwise unavailable, information it provides on crimes, criminals, criminal law, the local legal establishment, and the interaction of the local court systems in an era from which judicial court registers have not survived. It is important to note at the outset, however, that the dossier of the present study has a distinctly secular bias. Al-