On the road with the Templars

That day, it was not right. Employed by a Parisian security company, Alain Bouvet drives south by car, gripped by the idea of ​​changing his life. It arrives in Arveyres, a few kilometers from Libourne, in the Gironde. He is hungry for a sandwich at the bakery, but where to eat it?

His gaze falls on a sign indicating a “Templar commandery”. She is at the exit of the village. He pushes there and comes across a ruined building which, he does not yet know why, overwhelms him. These are the remains of a fortified house, overlooking the Dordogne over 4 hectares. His sandwich finished, he understands that he has found a new point of attachment. He calls his wife: a month later, they settled in Arveyres. “I still often come here alone, sit down and think. I feel serene there. “

Between Rauzan and Sauveterre, stands the Commandery of Sallebruneau, passed from the Templars, who founded it in 1214, in the Hospitallers, who recovered it in 1280

Since then, Alain Bouvet has paid his debt instead: going to rummage in the departmental archives of Haute-Garonne and Gironde, studying the excavations of archaeologist Jean-Luc Piat, he published a small book in self-publishing, The Templar Commandery of Arveyres, sold for the benefit of the association which tries to revive the building.

The Templars, members of a military-religious order created in the 12the century to protect pilgrims during the Crusades, were dissolved at the beginning of the 14the century by Pope Clement V and Philippe le Bel. If their leaders were burned, most of them joined other orders with similar goals, including that of the Hospitallers, created in XIe century. Established in Bordeaux, Gironde, from 1159, the Templars founded in Arveyres an important commandery, name given to large farms, often built in the shape of a square and comprising the residence of the commander, the house of the brothers, kitchens, barns, cellars, stables, a pond where fish were raised and a garden …

The stronghold of the Arveyres commandery, in Gironde, in 2021.

From there, they swarm to Marcenais, Saint-Laurent-d’Arce, Targon, Queynac and Magrigne, then later to La Grave-d’Ambarès and Sautuges-en-Médoc. The first mention of their presence dates from 1170, when the church of Saint-Pierre-de-Vaux was donated by Bertrand de Montault, Archbishop of Bordeaux, to the Order of the Temple.

In 1231, Raymond Gombaud, Lord of Vayres, added to it to have the good graces of the order the territory of Arveyres. Arveyres was one of the places of passage of the way of Saint-Jacques. The pilgrims who came from Périgueux crossed the Dordogne at the Pont du Noyer and stopped there. The Templars then established a “hospitable” house on the hill overlooking the Dordogne, to which they added a Romanesque church, placed under the invocation of Notre-Dame, and kept it until 1314, the year of the extinction of the order. The Hospitallers succeed them, and the commandery occupies a prominent place in the military system of Bordeaux until the French Revolution. Under it, traces of a Roman presence were found.

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