Maison dite Tour du Temple
MonumentHidden Treasure
Templar remnant from the 13th century at the heart of the Girondine bastide, the Tour du Temple raises its mediaeval stones and its ogival doorways as a challenge to the centuries, a rare testament to the power of the Ordre du Temple in Aquitaine.
History
As you wander through the narrow streets of Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, a fortified town founded in 1255 on the right bank of the Dordogne, you come across a medieval silhouette that stands out for its severity: the house known as the Tour du Temple. Built between 1280 and 1310, at the height of the Templars' power, this massive barlong building has four storeys - ground floor and three upper storeys - each consisting of a single vast room, a typical layout for the fortified houses built by the Knights Templar throughout the kingdom of France. What makes this monument absolutely unique is the coherence of its defensive and residential programme. The west façade, facing the town, opens out through two elegantly dressed ogival doors, a rare combination of military rigour and the architectural sophistication typical of the Knights Templar. A square tower flanks the east façade, reinforcing the fortified nature of the complex and providing a vantage point from which to observe the surrounding area. At a time when almost all the Templar commanderies in France have disappeared or been radically altered, the Tour du Temple at Sainte-Foy-la-Grande retains a remarkable structural integrity. To visit this monument is to plunge into the dense atmosphere of the Gascon Middle Ages. The thick walls seem to absorb the noise of the surrounding commercial town, creating a time bubble in which the imagination easily travels to the convoys of knights, the scenes of land administration and the secret conciliabula that preceded the tragic abolition of the Order in 1312. The verticality of the building, in an urban context where the arcaded houses of the bastide extend horizontally, accentuates its exceptional character. Listed as a Historic Monument since 1967, the Tour du Temple is an integral part of the heritage landscape of a town that deserves much more than just a stop-off on the bastide route. Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, with its medieval arcades and Protestant history, offers a coherent setting for this jewel of military-religious architecture from the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries.
Architecture
The Tour du Temple in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande is a building with a barlong plan - i.e. its base forms a rectangle with marked proportions - characteristic of the utilitarian and defensive constructions of medieval military-religious architecture. The building has four superimposed levels: a ground floor and three upper floors, each consisting of a single room. This simple, rational spatial organisation is typical of Templar tower-houses: it facilitates surveillance and the storage of foodstuffs and archives, and offers maximum resistance in the event of an attack. The west facade, overlooking the town, features two finely-coursed ogival doors whose pointed arches betray the influence of the Southern Gothic style in force in south-western France at the end of the 13th century. These openings, both functional and ornamental, reveal the particular care that Templar builders took in representing their power, even in buildings with a practical purpose. The square tower flanking the east facade is the most defensive element of the complex: it provided extensive surveillance of the surrounding area and controlled access, in line with the urban fortified houses common throughout the medieval Midi. The materials used were probably local limestone, abundant in the Dordogne valley, cut and assembled using techniques mastered by craftsmen working in the orbit of the great Templar and monastic construction sites in the region. The thickness of the walls, a sine qua non for the stability of these vertical residential towers, gives the building its compact, imposing silhouette, in stark contrast to the open, horizontal arcaded architecture of the houses in the surrounding bastide.
Related Figures
Alphonse de Poitiers — fondateur de la bastide de Sainte-Foy-la-Grande en 1255, dont la création favorisa l'implantation templière dans la régionJacques de Molay — dernier grand maître de l'Ordre du Temple, dont la tragique condamnation en 1314 scella le destin des possessions templières comme cette maisonPhilippe IV le Bel — roi de France ayant ordonné l'arrestation des Templiers en 1307 et provoqué la dissolution de l'Ordre, mettant fin à la vocation première de l'édificeClément V — pape d'Avignon ayant officiellement dissous l'Ordre du Temple au concile de Vienne en 1312, transférant théoriquement ses biens aux HospitaliersLes Hospitaliers de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem — héritiers officiels des biens templiers après 1312, probables gestionnaires de la maison dans les décennies suivant la dissolution
