Carved Doorway from a Templar Commandery at Montferrand, Auvergne
A tympanum in Volvic stone from the House of the Unicorns, part of the Templar commandery at Montferrand in the Auvergne, now installed at The Met Cloisters in New York. A commandery was a farm before it was anything else.
The order held several thousand commanderies across Europe, and the overwhelming majority never sent a man east. They were estates: arable, vineyards, mills, granges and stock, worked with the labour and the capital of a house that paid no tithe and answered to no bishop. That exemption is what let them invest — in mills, in drainage, in improved stock — on a longer horizon than a lay lord could afford, and it is also what made their neighbours resent them. See Templar commanderies and the spread of agricultural innovation in France.
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