ABSTRACT
In the first half of the twelfth century the Hospital and the Temple were developing into the earliest true religious orders. The foundation of the Templar commandery of Richerenches in 1136 was the culmination of a movement among an extended local landowning family, which had led to a whole lordship being handed over, while several of the kindred became Templars themselves. What was original was the subjection of the Hospitaller and Templar commanderies to provincial authorities which themselves answered to central governments in Jerusalem. Most houses must have been responsible for the administration of property on behalf of the convents in the East: ‘for the building up and support of the knighthood which is established in the Temple in Jerusalem’, as some benefactors of Richerenches put it. By that time the terms of the relationship between the local houses of the military orders and their provincial heads was becoming clear.
