I. The Commandery of Loudun and the Anti-Catholic Riots of the 1560s

The first important step in reconstructing the relations between the commandery and the Reformed community is to determine what happened to the commandery during the Wars of Religion. As discussed below, the collection of buildings that comprised Loudun's commandery lay in shambles by the late 1580s. But was Protestant iconoclasm the cause? In these long turbulent decades, some of the most harrowing examples of religious violence at the local level involved conflict between Protestants and Catholic ecclesiastical personnel and institutions. Loudun never experienced a massacre on the scale of the Michelade of Nîmes, but a highly destructive wave of anti-Catholic rioting tore through Loudun in the later 1560s. The bulk of the damage was carried out by a detachment from the Protestant army of the Prince de Condé. Having settled in Loudun to await the end of winter, the soldiers in all likelihood joined forces with local Protestant civilians and soldiers. From November 1568 to January 1569, they rained destruction on the town, torching churches, breaking statues, and dispatching clerics without pity.Footnote ⁸ Operating under cover of such chaos, it is possible that some of the town's Protestants pursued more material goals, snatching Catholic treasure, confiscating land titles and deeds, annexing property that did not belong to them, and wresting control of many an institution's revenue base.Footnote ⁹

Yet the possible document trail incriminating Huguenot iconoclasm for the commandery's ruinous state is weak. In the early seventeenth century, the intensely Catholic official Louis Trincant drafted two versions of a summary of Loudun's history and its political and religious institutions. In the documents, he provides revealing details about how many parish churches and religious houses in Loudun had fallen prey to iconoclastic fury during the religious wars. However, when discussing the commandery specifically, he gives only basic information about it, commenting on its origins and revenue base, all true to fact but nothing to connect the state of the commandery's buildings to Protestant iconoclasm.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, the archival documentation concerning the commandery is extensive (and particularly revealing of the commandery's history are the detailed inventories and on-site assessments of the buildings and property, written in order to determine the commandery's value and its ability to support the Order's larger goals). At times, the reasons for the commandery's later sixteenth-century demise are given. Take, for example, the following declaration made by Louis XIV in 1675 about the commandery's plight in the sixteenth century:

There is no mention of actual Protestant iconoclasm in this passage or in the document as a whole. Undoubtedly, comments such as these are problematic, having been written well after the fact; historical memory fades with time. Moreover, the absence of the mention of a specific cause does not preclude its existence. Still, other religious orders in Loudun, as a means of later gaining redress, did not hesitate to mention the scars left on their institutions by Protestant iconoclasm.Footnote ¹²

If it is possible that the anti-Catholic riots left the commandery's church unscathed, how can this be explained? If the insurgents vented their rage against so many Catholic edifices in the town, why would they have left the church of St. Jean untouched? The possible reason could very well lie in the Order's mandate and configuration, which seemed to concentrate on a context outside of France. The Order of the Knights of St. John (the Baptist) of Jerusalem, also known as the Knights Hospitaller and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, dates back to the second half of the eleventh century, in Jerusalem. It started by operating a hospice to care for pilgrims. The Hospitallers eventually gained papal recognition and a religious rule, as well as an expanded mission of protecting pilgrims en route to the Holy Land and defending the Crusader States that had emerged in the wake of the First Crusade. Once those States collapsed, the Order moved first to Cyprus and then to Rhodes and then to Malta from 1530, where the Order remained until the Napoleonic period.Footnote ¹³

The Order's orientation thus became directed at the Muslim presence in the Mediterranean, a goal that was transnational and outside the internecine conflicts of sixteenth-century France. Perhaps a common enemy discourages conflict between denominations that elsewhere in Europe were bitter enemies. The focus on a pan-European, pan-Christian imperative may have encouraged the Hospitallers to look at Protestant-Catholic difference with blurred eyes. During the Protestant Reformation, many monastic institutions had been dissolved in Protestant kingdoms across Europe, but many of the Order's commanderies continued to survive in Central Europe by making working arrangements with Protestant princes in circumstances that could not be changed.Footnote ¹⁴ Protestants in Europe may even have breathed a sigh of relief after the Hospitaller victory at the Siege of Malta, a monumental turning-point in the struggle against Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁵

The Order gained status in Europe for this transnational, pan-Christian imperative. In the Early Modern period, it would have been tempting to perceive the Order as the vestige of a movement that had essentially failed: the Crusader States had collapsed centuries earlier and the idea of capturing and keeping the Holy Land for Christendom had long faded into the past.Footnote ¹⁶ Not many of the commanderies in France actually ran hospitals, although these local priories were involved in poor relief. As for the knights themselves, it would be easy to depict them as outmoded appendages of the Middle Ages, akin to the Sotenvilles of Molière's play Georges Dandin.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet contemporaries still exalted the culture of chivalry, especially when it was tied intricately to Christian action. The Kings of France continued to bestow privileges upon the Grand Priory of Aquitaine (in whose jurisdiction Loudun's commandery lay).Footnote ¹⁸ Henri IV, for example, noted the sacrifices that the Priory made to thwart the efforts of the “infidèles,” which it did by sending funds to finance the Order's Mediterranean fleet, to fortify Malta's fortifications and maintain its garrisons, all of it serving as a critical bulwark of European Christendom.Footnote ¹⁹ Hospitallers all over France won exemptions from direct taxes such as the taille, but also taxes that other religious orders had to pay to the Crown, taxes such as the décimes. Because the Knights of the Order held noble title, they had their own set of privileges and judicial immunities.Footnote ²⁰ All of this attests to the continued status of the Order within France, a status that perhaps was not necessarily so foreign to French Protestants.

The Order's purpose and its status did not lend itself to combating Protestantism. The same can be said for the local commanderies. Each commandery in Europe was intended to offer care for travelers, to channel revenues from the commandery's estates and feudal benefices to the Order's headquarters in Malta and, to a lesser extent, to provide Catholic religious services for the local populations. However, most of the commandery's activity focused on managing its estates and revenues and sending the revenues to their superiors to pay for the endeavors noted above. In France, these payments were known as responsions, set in 1533 at two-thirds and later one-third of half a commandery's annual income.Footnote ²¹

It is possible that a number of the Grand Priories in France resisted the temptation to become embroiled in the French Wars of Religion. Undoubtedly, the religious civil wars certainly damaged the French commanderies in some way. Nicholson remarks that “the wars of religion in France, where the bulk of the Order's territories lay, disrupted half the revenues due to the Order's treasury.”Footnote ²² Some of the regional and local studies for southern and southwestern French commanderies note the destructive impact of Protestant military activity on the houses; some commandeurs even became involved in the fighting.Footnote ²³ Yet whatever happened in France was not enough to knock the Grand Priory of Aquitaine out of its position of neutrality, as the following entry in its register makes clear:

The entry is taken from a copy of a letter from the year 1592 that was sent to the Grand Master in Malta explaining why some commanderies were not operational. The letter speaks of the carnage of the religious wars, but Protestants are not blamed specifically. They are not even mentioned. It could be that the cause of the decline of Loudun's commandery in this period lay not in Protestant hostility, but in the dislocation of war and especially the depredations of unpaid, undisciplined soldiers that were so characteristic of armies during this period, whatever their confessional stripe. In these civil wars, the confessional lines between the combatants were not always clear.Footnote ²⁵ It may very well be that, thus following the example of commanderies elsewhere in Europe, Loudun's commandery chose to remain neutral in the Wars of Religion, preferring instead to focus on the greater goals of the Order. That neutrality may have saved the commandery from Protestant iconoclasm and indeed may have made the relations between the commandery and the Protestant community less confrontational.

On the surface, this path of neutrality seems quite unexpected, seemingly out-of-character with a religious military order. After all, one could argue that one of the effects of the religious wars was the militarization of some of the religious orders in general (although of course one finds variations within each order). Exacerbated by the spread of French Protestantism and terrified by the new reality of a Protestant heir to the French throne, members of the religious orders preached rebellion against a monarchy that they believed had failed in its oath to extirpate heresy from the kingdom. Some Jesuits penned monarchomach treatises, which may have inspired the assassination (by monks) of Kings Henri III and Henri IV; clerics were certainly prominent in the League's theocratic grip on Paris in the late 1580s and early 1590s; even in the art of the period, one finds terrifying images of armed priests and monks marching through the streets of Paris, inciting the local population with apocalyptic expectations. Similar examples could be found in provincial cities.Footnote ²⁶ In Loudun, in 1611 (well after the wars had formally ended), a group of Jesuits disseminated a rumor in the town that the King was preparing another St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and that all Protestants must quickly abjure in order to avoid certain death.Footnote ²⁷

The social background and training of the knights themselves may have contributed to the Hospitallers’ less confrontational attitude towards French Protestantism. Nicholson writes that the knights came mostly from families of the lesser nobility, and these entrants were not educated intensely in the fine points of Catholic theology, compared to the Jesuits, for example. A Hospitaller's title was not inherited, as was the case of conventional knightly titles. One had to gain admittance to the Order.Footnote ²⁸ Entrants could be as young as sixteen, an age that could not have boasted an extensive education at that point. Devoted to Catholic Christianity the Hospitallers certainly were, and eager to demonstrate their deep piety through Christian action. But, they were not formally ordained as priests and they were not monks or friars. More spiritually minded youth found their true vocation instead in the priesthood or the religious contemplative orders. Hospitaller Knights had a very different mandate from, say, the Jesuits, who were intensely engaged in missionary work, educating young men, and combating Protestantism (or at least encouraging the conversion of its adherents). The Hospitallers took more simple religious vows (chastity, poverty, obedience and the defense of the Catholic Church), promising to protect pilgrims and to provide medical care and shelter to travelers.Footnote ²⁹ The Hospitaller template congealed into an alloy of Christian action, knightly honor, and military virtue, rather than an assertive proselytizing mission. Indeed, it could be said that since the Hospitallers were a kind of hybrid of the noble and the clerical orders, the intensity of the latter was somewhat diluted.

Christophe de Jousseaume sieur du Couboureau provides an archetypical example of the expected background and preparation of a knight of the Order of Malta. He became the commandeur of Loudun around 1586 and held the post until 1620.Footnote ³⁰ His preuves de noblesse generally focus on his pedigree and his genealogy, tracing his noble ancestry back several generations. The rest of the document comments on his suitability for the simple religious vows that he would be required to make: the document attests that he had lived a moral life, that he was versed in the basic points of Catholic theology, that he had not made a marriage vow to any woman, that he goes to church regularly, and so on. He was only seventeen at the time the document was drafted.Footnote ³¹ Overall, his upbringing and education made him suitable to be a Hospitaller knight rather than a Jesuit missionary or Capuchin preacher.

II. The Commandery's Operations during the Religious Wars

Despite the wars and the crumbling state of the commandery's church, the commandery itself continued to draw upon an enviable array of assets and in fact kept many of its operations alive. It was situated in a highly dynamic area of town that was known for the number of aristocratic and bourgeois establishments. The commandery's church was located on the rue St. Jean; but, the commandery's other buildings looked onto the rue de la Porte-de-Chinon, one of the main arteries of the town,Footnote ³² giving the commandery a strong visible presence in this locality. The church itself perhaps dates back to the twelfth century, although it was much smaller and far less ornate and distinctive than some of the other ecclesiastical buildings in the town. In addition to its church, the commandery had a noble residence for the commandeurs, complete with stables as well as small buildings and granaries for those who were involved in collecting revenues in cash and kind on the commandery's behalf.Footnote ³³

What attracted the most attention was the commandery's feudal revenue base. A court sentence from 1576 notes that Loudun's commandery enjoyed significant revenues because of the large surface area of its fief in the town. Indeed, perusing the inventaire sommaire of the commandery's main archival collection, one finds that its feudal network stretched across many quarters in Loudun and many domains in the surrounding countryside. While it would be difficult to determine when the commandery acquired each of these fiefs and benefices, it certainly had held many of them for a long time because the archival bundles for each of these in question often contain documents that date back to the later Middle Ages. The inventaire lists the fiefs for the commandery of Loudun as well as the commandery of the Moullins, located in the nearby parish of Bournand (the two commanderies were conglomerated in 1582, a development that is discussed below). The two commanderies drew feudal revenues from thirty-six streets within Loudun as well as the town's four faubourgs and fifty-one parishes in the surrounding countryside. These two commanderies also received dues from the commandery de St. Jean de l'hôpital de Saumur and the commandery of Vitray.Footnote ³⁴ Regardless of their source, these revenues could be rentes on rented property owned by the commandery, cens (a form of property tax on property not owned by the commandery but which exists within one of the commandery's fiefs), lods et ventes (a fee paid to the commandery when a piece of property in one of its fiefs changed hands in some way), and the droit d'aubaine (a fee paid by the heirs of a piece of property whose previous owner had not been a subject of the King of France).Footnote ³⁵

The commandeurs themselves enjoyed significant feudal rights. Several documents indicate that Loudun's commandeur as a noble lord enjoyed the rights of low and medium justice and, in the seventeenth century, high justice. These judicial privileges ranged from obliging all vassals to pay to use the commandery's windmill for grinding grain, to seizing property for unpaid feudal dues, and to imprisoning tenants.Footnote ³⁶ Like any seigneur, the commandeur held a court of assizes, presided over by a seneschal, which served as a court of first instance for the commandery's vassals.

The Order's responsibility of protecting poor pilgrims in the Holy Land echoed in the charitable work of Loudun's commandeur. For some time in the Middle Ages, Loudun's commandery may have had a hospice or small hospital of sorts.Footnote ³⁷ The street itself in the property sale documentation is sometimes referred to as “rue de St. Jehan de l'hospital” and the fief is often referred to as “fief de la commanderie de St. Jean de l'hospital de Loudun.”Footnote ³⁸ Such terminology may refer to the memory of a hospital that once existed or perhaps to the Order's original vocation as well as the physical building of the Hospital that had been established in Jerusalem to care for pilgrims. Yet the commandery's hospital definitely no longer existed by the later sixteenth century. No reference to an existing hospital of any kind can be found in the commandery's documentation for our period of observation, not in the assessments of the improvements made to the commandery in the seventeenth century, not in the indications of neighboring properties cited in any sale of property close to the commandery. Nor is there any documented link with Loudun's aumônerie de St. Jean, discussed below.Footnote ³⁹ Instead, the commandery's charitable role metamorphosed into a quite sizeable donation of bread to be distributed as alms to the poor at the commandery's doorstep every week on Thursdays and Sundays.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Wars of Religion did leave their mark on the commandery, but perhaps not in the same way as they did for other religious institutions. In spite of the civil chaos, many of the commandery's operations continued, be it revenue collection on the commandery's fiefs, or holding the assizes, or deploying legal counsel in court cases. In the 1560s and the 1570s, Loudun's commandery seems to have continued to rest on a stable financial footing. Admittedly, the number of commandeurs had shrunk by then from four knights to just one.Footnote ⁴¹ Despite that development, the commandeur for this period, Philippe Bigot, does seem to have been an active defender of the commandery's interests. The available documentation does not indicate whether religious services were being held on a regular basis in the church or if the responsions were being paid regularly to the Priory of Aquitaine. But, he did pass a kind of lease called a bail à rente with a bread maker that included a clause for the preparation and distribution of the alms of bread. Bigot did make some improvements to the buildings (although the central Convent, or council, in Malta deemed the improvements insufficient).Footnote ⁴² The numerous property sale contracts for this period indicate that, on the whole, little confusion existed surrounding the feudal dues that were owed to the commandery. That suggests an efficient administration of the commandery's feudal revenue base. Bigot is often seen acting directly or at least appearing in person in court cases involving the commandery. The assizes were held in the commandery's residence; other documents were also prepared on that site.Footnote ⁴³ All of this evidence points to a picture of a commandery that was for the most part operational in these two decades.

Then, in the early 1580s the commandery experienced a metamorphosis. Bigot continued as commandeur until the early years of the decade, but the commandery of Loudun was joined with the nearby commanderie de Moullins, located in the parish of Bournand, just on the outskirts of Loudun. This did not change the revenue base for each commandery because their respective fiefs remained distinct; but, it would all be administered by one commandeur and not two (for the sake of clarity, the following pages of this paper will refer to the two commanderies as one commandery).Footnote ⁴⁴ The reason behind this decision is shrouded in obscurity, but elsewhere in the Grand Priory's domains, unions of commanderies usually took place for financial reasons and economies of scale; the chaos caused by the wars also played a role.Footnote ⁴⁵ Such factors may very well explain the union of the two commanderies.

Jousseaume began his long tenure of commandeur around 1586, perhaps somewhat earlier. Yet at that point even though he was commandeur of both commanderies, he decided to take up residence in the Moullins commandery. Indeed, the center of operations for these two commanderies migrated to the Moullins and stayed there for decades to come.Footnote ⁴⁶ Moreover, as we shall discuss below, the commandery's church of St. Jean was left to fall into decrepitude and by the late 1580s the church could not have been functioning as a place of worship. However, the commandery's revenue collection still continued apace.Footnote ⁴⁷

What is also intriguing is that through the Wars of Religion, many of the individuals who worked for the commandeur were Protestant. Bigot perhaps saw no contradiction between being a member of the Order of St. John and hiring Protestants. The merchant Louis Ollivier was the commandery's main revenue collector (the fermier) from as far back as 1575, perhaps even 1572, and he can be seen having his children baptized in the Reformed Church in Loudun as early as 1581.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is also more than likely that the commandery's seneschal and procurator were Protestant, although the available data is not as conclusive as it is for Ollivier.Footnote ⁴⁹

Bigot's confessional choices must have been based on his own personal religious sentiments. Although fermes Footnote ⁵⁰ could be passed on from one fermier to the next (even without the intervention of the commandeur), there was nothing obligating Bigot to choose Protestants for legal counsel. Loudun possessed a sizeable contingent of Catholic lawyers and procureurs Footnote ⁵¹ to come to Bigot's aid and he could have easily drawn upon that contingent. It could very well be that the fact that the commandery escaped the rage of Protestant iconoclasm made the use of Protestant revenue-collectors a less unpalatable pill to swallow for Loudun's commandeurs. Perhaps they did not feel the same bitter resentment as did members of other religious orders whose institutions had been mauled by anti-Catholic violence and some of whose members died horrible deaths in front of jeering spectators.Footnote ⁵²

III. The Conversion of the Church of St. Jean into a Protestant Temple

This Protestant influence over the commandery's affairs must have served Loudun's Protestant community well and may have helped facilitate the next critical step in the relations between the commandery and Loudun's Protestant community. At that point, the respective histories of both became more intertwined. Around perhaps late February but certainly by early March 1589, the commandery's church on the rue St. Jean became the center of confessional life for Loudun's Protestants inside the city, and it remained as such until the construction of a much larger Protestant temple by around 1610.Footnote ⁵³ The conversion of a Catholic church into a Protestant temple certainly represents a strange spectacle for this period, considering the intense confessional conflict and religious persecution that characterized this stage of the Wars of Religion. Such a spectacle invites questions pertaining to the means by which this transfer took place and the reasons that could explain why the parties involved agreed to it.

Protestant temples had always been a painful bone of contention during the wars. In an instructive article, Penny Roberts notes that one of the biggest sources of confessional struggle and discontent at the local level lay in the location and even the existence of the Protestant temple, the center of its preaching, or prêches. As tangible symbols of a Reformed Protestant presence, the temples raised the ire of militant Catholics who saw such buildings as a dangerous indulgence conceded to heretics. The Protestant temples, then, were the great stumbling block in the negotiations between the Crown and the Protestant party, and all the edicts of pacification tried often unsuccessfully to reach a compromise on this issue that would satisfy both sides. The Peace of Amboise of 1563, which concluded the first war, allowed the Protestant minority freedom of conscience and the prerogative to practice their religion either on a noble estate or in the suburbs of one town in each bailliage or sénéchaussée (the geographic jurisdiction of local royal law courts). Loudun's Reformed community qualified for such a designation.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, Protestants all over France found the Edict's provisions to be inadequate and easily flouted by their Catholic opponents.

The Reformed presence in Loudun had been precarious through these decades of religious civil war and establishing a temple here proved to be an uphill battle. In 1577, Catholics in Loudun destroyed the first Protestant temple in retaliation for the iconoclasm of the previous year. Loudun's Protestants continued to live in the town, but they had to travel to the nearby community of Baussay in order to practice their faith. Yet the Reformed community continued to grow and may have numbered close to 4,000 individuals; the consistory and its diaconate still functioned; and many socio-professional elites maintained their allegiance to the Reformed faith, despite the demoralization that seeped into many Reformed communities in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572.Footnote ⁵⁵ Moreover, according to a pamphlet published in 1586, there were two pastors serving the Reformed congregation,Footnote ⁵⁶ again suggesting a respectable degree of resilience and conviction in spite of such desperate circumstances.

The means by which a Catholic Hospitaller church became a site of Protestant worship can be traced to the immediate political climate created by a specific phase in the “War of the Three Henrys” (1587–1589). The League's grasp on the monarchy was so tight that King Henri III, in tears, had to put his signature on the Edict of Union (July 1588), which outlawed Protestantism and barred Henri de Navarre from the succession. Having then been forced to flee his own capital, Henri III attempted to short-circuit the League by ordering the assassination of its de facto leadership, Henri duc de Guise and his brother, a disastrous move that only served to inflame the Holy League further.Footnote ⁵⁷ The League overran Paris and the resultant political turmoil shifted the theater of war to the provinces, particularly the Poitou (thus threatening Loudun).Footnote ⁵⁸ The League fought with almost eschatological fervor, driven by the knowledge that a Protestant prince stood next in line to the throne. With the League in control of many of the provinces north of Paris, Navarre sought to consolidate his position in and around the Loire Valley, because it offered a string of highly fortified points along a strategic nodal trajectory to Paris. Navarre began his campaign in this region on February 19, 1589. What is clear in the letters to Navarre is that Loudun had become an important component in this strategy. Navarre's army invested the city and, after a short and relatively painless siege, on February 25 the city capitulated.Footnote ⁵⁹

Navarre treated the conquered city benignly, but the terms of surrender certainly swung the confessional balance of power somewhat towards the Protestant camp. He promised to maintain Catholic liberties and religious prerogatives. There would be no eviction of Catholic inhabitants, no seizure of the temporal revenues of any Catholic ecclesiastical institution. Yet, remembering the local governor's refusal to accept Loudun's surrender, Navarre replaced him with the Protestant Pierre Prevost de Cherbonnières and his loyal captain Marc-Antoine Marreau de Boisguérin.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although Navarre's actions did not transform Loudun into a Huguenot fortress, such as La Rochelle, clearly he had galvanized Loudun's Reformed community considerably.

The conversion of the commandery's church as a Protestant temple fit into this development. To consolidate and maintain the loyalty of the town's Protestant community, Navarre had to establish a concrete Reformed Protestant presence within the town walls; the continued practice of Reformed Protestant worship in Baussay would be incongruous with that imperative. In all probability, it is this imperative that explains the transformation of the commandery's church into a Protestant temple.Footnote ⁶¹ At that point in his life, Navarre was years away from his conversion to Catholicism; he had become the nucleus of Huguenot resistance in France. He depended on Protestant communities for his campaigns within France but also for his alliances with Protestant princes outside of France.Footnote ⁶² Protestants in France also depended on him; it would only be through Navarre that they could regain any semblance of freedom of religious worship, still illegal at that point.Footnote ⁶³

Yet despite the building's many shortcomings, using it seemed to be the path of least resistance. Navarre would not have dared to confiscate one of the two Catholic parish churches, even though they were much larger and in much better condition.Footnote ⁶⁴ Navarre's hold over the town and the region remained tenuous; forever the diplomat, he sought to placate both confessional sides in order to maintain civil peace as well as strengthen his strategic position in that province. The letters of Loudun's former governor, François de Rasilly, attest to a ligueur presence in Loudun, even within the château and central citadel. The League still terrorized the surrounding countryside. Indeed, the League had attacked the town on at least one occasion through the 1580s. Once, the city had surrendered to the (royal) army of the ultra-Catholic duc de Joyeuse, after an obstinate resistance; Joyeuse was about to hand over the city to the rapacity of his soldiers, were it not for the diplomacy and the poetry of Scèvole de Sainte-Marthe, who with the musicality of Orpheus persuaded Joyeuse to change his mind.Footnote ⁶⁵ Overall, the city was not impregnable and there remained the ever-present danger of a ligueur assault.

If Navarre was not yet the King of France, how did the transfer of the commandery's church survive against what certainly would have been Catholic resistance? The ligueur elements, within Loudun and outside, could not have approved. For his part, Henri III had begun to move away from his ultra-Catholic stance; in any case, the royal assassination of the Guise in December 1588 made Henri's adherence to the Edict of Union a dead letter. By April 1589, the King decided that the only way that he could retrieve some of his faltering authority from the League would be by making an alliance with Navarre. By late April, the truce was set: both Navarre and Henri would join their forces to effectuate military campaigns against the League. Navarre would keep one town in every bailliage or sénéchaussée that he had conquered up to that point from the League. In those localities, in exchange for promising to respect Catholic worship and citizens, Protestant worship would be allowed in spite of the Edict of Union.Footnote ⁶⁶ The church that had been consigned to Loudun's Protestants presumably fell under the umbrella of these terms and thus the transfer was secure.

One must wonder why the Protestants would have accepted such a church as the center of their confessional life. Not much larger than a chapel, the interior of the church of St. Jean was only 120 meters in length and a little more than five meters in width, an ecclesiastical space hardly sufficient to welcome comfortably for Sunday service the approximately 4,000 individuals noted above (unless the community resorted to multiple services).Footnote ⁶⁷ Structurally, the church was on the verge of collapse: a new roof had to be built, pillars had to be replaced, windows had to be repaired, and the walls fortified. Masons and carpenters would need all their arts.

On a more religious level, the commandery's church posed dilemmas for Loudun's Protestant community. Protestants and Catholics harbored very different ideas about what a place of worship should look like and function, differences that concerned the layout of the building, the use of images, and so on. Reformed Protestantism did not even refer to a church in the same way as Catholics did. In the Reformed tradition, a church was referred to as a “temple” (perhaps inspired in part by Old Testament terminology and imagery, but also motivated by a need to dissociate their faith from Catholic metaphors and practices).Footnote ⁶⁸ Reformed Protestants did not see ecclesiastical buildings as consecrated and thus in some ways sacred; Reformed Protestant churches were more strictly utilitarian (the spirituality lay with what went on inside of them). That belief made retrofitting Catholic churches for Protestant use entirely possible and theologically acceptable.

Still, in many respects the design of medieval Catholic churches did not lend itself to the architectural principles that Reformed Protestants tried to inculcate in their temples. Since Protestantism focused on preaching the Word, their temples had to converge on a central focal point: the pulpit. And, since the congregation was expected to listen attentively to the Word preached, Reformed Protestant architecture for the most part leaned towards a polygonal, sometimes amphitheatric design, which Protestant architects believed would maximize the engagement between all congregants and their preacher, much more so than the medieval cruciform church design. Likewise, departing from Catholic practice Reformed Protestant temples saw biblical imagery as distracting rather than didactic; temples had to be austere, aniconic, with little ornamentation, so as to heighten the focus on the Word and the pastor who preached it.Footnote ⁶⁹ That was the ideal, in any case.

Yet the commandery's church was rectangular, with the focal point leading to the High Altar and the sacrament of the Mass. Even more unpalatable, the church contained ornamentation, certainly nothing to rival the exuberant Renaissance entrance of the parish church of St. Pierre du Marché, but in some ways more awkward. The ornamentation inside the commandery's church seemed strangely burlesque, almost sexualized: deeply carved images of nude men and angels with their thighs and buttocks exposed to a baffled congregation, hardly suitable for inspiring meditations on the divine.Footnote ⁷⁰

Loudun's Protestants might have felt short-changed in promising Navarre their loyalty in return for such a problematic ecclesiastical edifice. But, it did provide the Reformed community with a place within the formidable town walls and not in the faubourgs on the outside. After all, Loudun was subject to a siege on at least one occasion in the 1590s by the Holy League.Footnote ⁷¹ Perhaps the consistory begrudgingly accepted the use of a Catholic building because this confessional community could not afford at this stage to build a new one (that would come much later, through the generous patronage of their governor Pierre de Chouppes and then Boisguérin).Footnote ⁷² Right through the 1590s, the consistory's elders and deacons spoke in an increasingly desperate tone of the extensive debts of the Protestant community.Footnote ⁷³ Echoing Navarre's motives, the commandery's church was the choice of least resistance: it did not require the eviction of Catholic ecclesiastical personnel and it was less likely to ignite a violent confrontation with the Catholic community. Conceivably, too, using a Catholic edifice immunized Protestant worship from assault, to some degree. Catholic insurgents in the town did not hesitate to destroy the first Protestant temple, but perhaps they might think twice before attacking the second one, knowing full well that it had been originally consecrated as a Catholic church and hence perhaps still retained a spark of that sanctity.Footnote ⁷⁴ Moreover, as we have seen, the Protestant community of Loudun already had a foothold in the commandery's operations.

More importantly, maintaining a church within the city walls was a mark of urban presence, even a badge of confessional pride, of legitimacy. That urban foothold broadcast a message that the Huguenot minority was an intrinsic part of the local and national community.Footnote ⁷⁵ After all, many of the baptismal entries in the Baussay registers up to August 1581 contain the words “à Baussay,” hinting that the pastor and the consistory considered the tenure there to be undesirable and temporary.Footnote ⁷⁶ Certainly, holding religious services inside Loudun would no longer necessitate the potentially dangerous passage to Baussay. It is the same imperative for an urban presence that underlies the struggle by the Protestant minority to prevent their cemetery from being moved to the faubourgs. In life as in death, the Protestants wanted to sustain their place within the city walls and not be marginalized ignominiously to the outside.Footnote ⁷⁷

Once the commandery's church became a Protestant temple, the consistory wasted no time in arranging the repairs. Many of the entries in the register attest to the consistory's work to reinforce the walls and internal pillars, to repair the breaches in the walls, and have the roof completely redone; the windows needed to be refitted and the wooden beams that held up the church required reinforcement. The consistory also undertook the renovation of the walls separating the church from its neighbors. Later, the consistory wanted to give some semblance of a proper Reformed Protestant temple, and thus a pulpit had to be built.Footnote ⁷⁸

All of this work took a great deal of time and progress remained slow. Six years after the transfer, the consistory was still trying to arrange the repair of the roof, although contracts had been made with masons years earlier.Footnote ⁷⁹ The repairs took so long to effectuate not only because the consistory struggled to stay one step ahead of its debts, as we have noted above, but also because of the strong charitable impulse that had taken root in the consistory's personnel. In spite of the consistory's enormous debts, in spite of the fact that their place of worship remained in a dysfunctional state of disrepair, the consistory devoted a considerable part of its energies and revenue base to helping Loudun's poor as well as refugees from other communities. Indeed, in the consistory's registers, 706 of the 3,421 entries deal with the distribution of charity. Such charity took on a heightened importance during the religious wars of the 1590s, when Navarre, who became the Catholic Henri IV King of France, fought on against a Holy League that refused to accept him as their king. The consequent military campaigns sent many a religious refugee to Loudun's walls begging for aid. In many cases, the consistory answered the call.Footnote ⁸⁰

The commandeur never appears in the consistory's deliberations during these years. He seems to have fully divested himself of the church and operated from his base in the Moullins. Yet he was still facilitating repairs and improvements for the commandery in some way during this decade (although more so in the Moullins).Footnote ⁸¹ Members of the Protestant community, interestingly, were still deeply involved in the commandery's affairs. Louis Ollivier continued in his role as receveur (revenue collector) of the commandery and he was summoned on a number of occasions before the consistory. We cannot be sure if it was for business relating to the commandery, but it is intriguing that Ollivier is always identified in these entries as “receveur de la commanderie.”Footnote ⁸²

Still, it would be inaccurate to claim that the commandeur was the consistory's puppet, entirely dependent on the consistory for its sustenance and slavishly following its every order. Consider the following entry in the consistory's registers:

If the consistory had to run to a high Catholic official to make the commandeur pay his customary alms, then Loudun's Protestants could not have been in complete control of the commandery's revenue base. Other entries in the consistorial registers convey the same message.Footnote ⁸⁴

Perhaps we have here in the consistory's attitude a resigned acceptance of the need to work with Catholic institutions (in this case a Hospitaller commandery), in the interests of poor relief. The consistory could not in fact operate alone to help refugees and the poor. After all, Loudun's charitable institutions were woefully inadequate, made even more so by the Wars of Religion. For example, the consistory collaborated with the aumônerie de St. Jean, a kind of small hospice that contained about nine beds. Offering shelter and medical assistance, the aumônerie had once been staffed by four clerics. However, marauding soldiers had burned its feudal titles and thus its revenue base had dissipated significantly. By the late sixteenth century only one prior staffed the aumônerie, and he was of dubious reputation.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet, although we cannot ascertain the precise relations between the consistory and the aumônerie, the consistorial registers tell us that the hospice cared for a number of Protestants and that the consistory made financial and medical contributions to the institution to assist it in its work. The consistory worked with the commandery in a similar manner to alleviate poverty, but this form of charitable collaboration seems to have involved doing everything possible to ensure that the commandeur distributes the weekly alms, even if that meant appealing to Catholic officials to achieve that goal.Footnote ⁸⁶

We do not know the extent to which the consistory succeeded in restoring the church completely. What can be said is that this occupation provided the necessary base for the Reformed community to flourish in Loudun, at least for a time. The foothold inside the town that the temple provided must have facilitated other developments that strengthened this confessional community. First, the temple certainly consolidated the community's legal title as a place of worship and confessional life. Loudun's Reformed community qualified in 1598 as a culte de possession under the terms of the Edict of Nantes, the most enduring edict of pacification to come out of the religious wars. This legal title of culte de possession was accorded to those churches that were already in existence in the years 1596 and in 1597 up until the end of August.Footnote ⁸⁷ Such a title was certainly stronger than the title of culte de fief (whereby Protestant religious worship took place on a seigneur's fief, but ceased if he converted to Catholicism) and even the culte de concession (Reformed worship was conceded to two localities for each bailliage and sénéchaussée, but the temple could only be situated in the faubourgs of those localities).Footnote ⁸⁸ With its status of culte de possession, the prerogative of Reformed Protestant religious worship in Loudun withstood a number of challenges throughout the seventeenth century. Such a title was probably a critical factor in enabling this community and its church to endure until the moment of the Revocation.Footnote ⁸⁹

This legal stability may have contributed to the flourishing of Loudun's Reformed community in the early seventeenth century. Although not impervious to attack from local Catholic factions, one could argue that the first few decades of the seventeenth century represent the zenith of the Reformed presence in this town. They built a new temple, which opened its doors around 1610. It was a much larger edifice, reflecting the confessional community's growing status.Footnote ⁹⁰ Buttressing that status was a bedrock of military power, because the town and its commanding fortifications had been designated as one of the places de sûreté allotted by the Crown to the Huguenot party as a form of collateral to ensure the continuance of the Edict of Nantes. As such, the governor and the garrison were Protestant and many Huguenot assemblies and synods were held inside the town walls.Footnote ⁹¹ Although Loudun was not a “ville huguenote” as some Catholics claimed,Footnote ⁹² the Protestant community here had become a sizeable, wealthy, and influential minority, hovering between twenty-five to forty percent of a total local population that oscillated between about 6,000 and 10,000 inhabitants. Moreover, Protestant officeholders occupied strategic positions in the town's two royal courts and it could be said that Protestant mercantile families dominated Loudun's tax-collecting institutions and its economic life.Footnote ⁹³

The Reformed community of Loudun did not constitute a Huguenot stronghold such as La Rochelle, but it could sometimes act like one. For example, although Loudun's Protestants did not try to abolish the Catholic mass, the obstinate Protestant governor continually refused to allow Catholic processions to enter the town; during Catholic feast days Protestants conducted business openly and with impunity.Footnote ⁹⁴ All of these attributes and all of this bravura enabled Loudun's Reformed community to withstand the sporadic outbursts of confessional violence and conflict that continued into this period of relative peace.

IV. The Commandery's Path to Restoration in the Seventeenth Century

When the Protestants finished the construction of a larger temple in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the temple on the rue St. Jean returned to the commandery and became once again a Catholic edifice. At that point, the histories of the Reformed Church and the commandery proceeded along different trajectories. The commandery's reconstruction gained momentum in the seventeenth century, particularly under the vigorous leadership of the commandeur François de Talhouet (who governed the commandery from 1648 to 1669 or 1670). However, the commandery's reconstruction did not necessarily happen as a result of the Catholic resurgence that was sweeping across France in the seventeenth century and making its mark on biconfessionally mixed localities such as Loudun. If Loudun's commandery had any role to play in this resurgence, it was on the outer orbit of this movement.

Loudun's commandeurs continued their position of neutrality in France's confessional struggles of the seventeenth century. Jousseaume, for example, does not appear anywhere in the highly confessionalized struggles over Loudun's fortifications, its status as a place de sûreté, the legitimacy and location of the Protestant cemetery and the Protestant schools, or even the infamous Grandier Affair, the trial and execution of a Catholic priest falsely convicted of orchestrating the demonic infiltration of the town's Ursuline convent.Footnote ⁹⁵

The commandeur cannot even be found acting as godfather in the baptismal registers (except once), whereas the leaders of Loudun's Catholic vanguard, including clerics, repeatedly served in this capacity. Indeed, it represented one of the ways that they built support and critical mass for their cause.Footnote ⁹⁶ Likewise, in a data set of one hundred Catholic testaments for the period from 1611 to 1665, not one bequest was left to the commandery. Devout Catholic testators did not hesitate to leave sizeable bequests to religious houses in Loudun; some testators even left multiple bequests to various Catholic institutions. But no testamentary bequest came to the commandeur. Perhaps the reason here lies in the inability of the commandeur to say masses for the soul of the deceased testator as it makes its way through Purgatory (often a wish and sometimes a condition of many of these Catholic bequests to religious institutions).Footnote ⁹⁷

Not only did a chasm exist between intensely Catholic laity and Loudun's commandery, but the commandery also in fact differed remarkably from other Catholic institutions such as the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Château. The Jesuits acquired this Benedictine house in 1606, after it had suffered much damage at the hands of Protestant violence in the previous decades. Once the Jesuits took the reins of the priory, they drove it on an entirely different and assertive path of recovery and Catholic action.Footnote ⁹⁸

How can one explain this seemingly tepid attitude of the commandeurs towards the restoration of the Catholic faith and presence in Loudun? One should not interpret this distancing from the theaters of confessional conflict as a sign of disinterest or insensitivity. During the first few decades of the seventeenth century, Jousseaume was intensely active in the affairs of the Grand Priory of Aquitaine, as treasurer, deputy, and representative; he also carried out improvements on parts of the commandery's domains.Footnote ⁹⁹ In all likelihood, the commandeurs followed the position of neutrality that they adopted during the Wars of Religion, thinking beyond the locality to the greater objectives of the Hospitaller Order. The commandery certainly continued to pay the responsions. Restoring the commandery's buildings and revenue base in Loudun and the Moullins served that goal, even if the restoration was not intended to further the program of the Catholic resurgence as well as the marginalization of the Protestant minority. After all, the commandeurs continued to employ Protestants in revenue collection. Louis and Pierre Ollivier (descendants of Louis Ollivier), Daniel Avril, Solomon Guérin, Claude Corbeau, Jacquette Deliard, and Isaac Crozé all worked for the commandery in this capacity. And they were all Protestant.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, the commandeurs displayed a marked preference for hiring Catholic procureurs, among them Jean Moreau and François Briant.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In these hiring preferences, perhaps the commandeurs were following a deliberate strategy. Loudun's Protestants enjoyed a powerful presence among the town's merchants as well as within financial institutions such as the élection and the grenier à sel.Footnote ¹⁰² Loudun's Protestants thus may have developed an unfaltering reputation for their work in finance, revenue collecting, and squeezing money out of peasants. These Protestants represented, then, a wise choice for collecting the commandery's feudal revenues. Loudun's Catholics, having gained dominance in the bailliage and the prévôté, could have represented to the commandery a more logical recruiting ground for lawyers and procureurs, because the commandery's legal counsel would receive a more sympathetic hearing in these confessionally driven courts.Footnote ¹⁰³

Of all these individuals, the Protestant Ollivier kin group continued to be the most heavily involved in the commandery's operations: that could be because the Ollivier carried great influence as merchants and tax officials, but also as lawyers. The Ollivier were aptly suited for acting as revenue collectors for the commandery, but also representing the commandeurs in elaborate litigation that made its ways all the way up to the Parlement of Paris, the main court of appeal for much of central France.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The commandery's heavy reliance on the Ollivier was undoubtedly a “love-hate relationship.” If we are to believe documents from a later period, it appears that Louis Ollivier the Elder was withholding information from the commandeur about the commandery's revenue base; Ollivier also annexed some property belonging to the commandery. Later, the commandeur would have to take Ollivier and his kin to court in order to recover the hidden titles.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ De Talhouet nurtured a particularly negative impression of the Ollivier, accusing them of having “usurped” property that had belonged to the commandery.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The commandery's road to recovery would be a long one. The detailed reports on the condition of the commandery in Loudun show that the church remained dilapidated until at least 1640 and that it was not fully restored until as late as the 1650s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ De Talhouet was the driving force behind this. In a highly detailed document from 1657, we see that liturgical objects and paintings are visible in the church, a sure sign of recovery. The commissaries noted all the work that had been done to restore the church, recording with approval how sound, functional, and even beautiful the structure had become. Catholic religious services were also being said inside, by a local Franciscan, which thus resurrected the status of the church as a pole of Catholic worship in the town. The residence of the commandeur also went through a restoration, and the documentation tells us that the center of the commandery's operations migrated back to Loudun.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The commandery had retrieved its place and presence in the town.

The full reconstruction of the commandery's revenue base would pose a greater challenge and persist well into the 1650s. Because of the lost feudal titles, de Talhouet and other commandeurs found themselves still pursuing feudal dues from tenants who, strangely, seemed to have no recollection of ever having paid them. That required dragging the unwilling tenants before the local law courts, but also pursuing other Catholic institutions such as the Jesuit priory and the royal abbey of Fontevrault.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Yet quite conceivably the twenty-year Protestant occupation of the church, and all the work done to repair it, may have set the wheels of restoration in motion. To be sure, the church would not be fully functional until decades later, but perhaps it can be said that the Protestants prevented the structure from falling into a state that would be beyond repair. The commandery's charitable function would be eclipsed by the Maison de Charité, a small hospital that opened its doors in 1649,Footnote ¹¹⁰ but the commandery survived nonetheless.