La justice du commandeur (Bas-Rhône, XIIIe s.)

Abstract

The Commander’s Justice (Lower Rhône, 13th Century). Military orders, as lords of the church, practiced temporal justice on the people under their rule. Historiography, even if it has looked at conflicts of jurisdiction between sovereign powers and commanderies, has largely underestimated the latter’s judicial activities. In the South of France, the numerous archive documents of the orders of the Hospital and of the Temple show an interesting series of proceedings of judicial practice (verbal public announcements, criminal inverstigations, condemnation statements etc.). The important role of knights in the spreading of judicial practices and in maintaining social order, as shown by the Templar commanderies in Lansac and Montfrin, can thus be emphasised - especially if one draws a comparison with the remarkable study of the wide jurisdiction of the order of the Hospital in Manosque which has recently been carried out. The documents make a list of the staff employed to serve those small commandery courts, the procedures used by criminal judges, the cracking down of ordinary crime in those castra of the Lower-Rhône region and, lastly, of the different checks put to the coercive power of the order of the Temple by the organisation of communities and the consolidation of the influence of the state. The peculiarity of the justice of the Church (which did not hesitate to use merum imperium and to give corporal sentences) can hardly be seen through the way it worked, the ideals it pursued and the repressive action which it took.