The aim of this paper is to propose a state of knowledge on the castral architecture and protection of the religious establishments founded by the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem in southwestern France from the twelfth to the end of the fifteenth century. The archaeological traces of a fortification implemented from the foundation of the houses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are rare. Only the written sources provide a few clues as to the presence of a castral architecture within the commanderies, without it being possible to determine whether it was an architectural legacy linked to the founding of the religious establishment through donations, or whether it was a real desire on the part of the religious community to build, ex nihilo, a castral complex intended to house it.
At the end of the Middle Ages, during the Hundred Years' War, the hospital commanderies were the object of an important defense. This fortification of religious houses in a context of insecurity resulted in the construction of towers and enclosures, as well as the defense of churches, barns and agricultural domains.
This generalized fortification also concerns the habitat that was agglomerated near the hospital domus. This question raises all sorts of problems. Recent work on military religious orders in the West, in southern France in particular, has exposed the absence of true castles built to house these new Hospitaller or Templar regular communities, unlike what is observed for the same period in the Iberian Peninsula or in the Latin East, albeit in a different socio-political and military context 1.
We find traces of measures undertaken as early as the twelfth century to defend the houses of the Hospital in Languedoc. However, they are still difficult to apprehend due to the many problems greatly limiting their analysis. Most of them come from available sources, monumental or written, that were preserved, but they document the subject unequally.
However, among the many forms of material translation of the Hospitallers' habitat, which does not follow any typical plan or architecture which are common features of the habitat developed within military monasticism, some houses benefitted from elements characteristic of a castral architecture as early as the twelfth century. This phenomenon is however more clearly noticeable among Templar establishments in the Quercy, Rouergue or Albigeois for example, where, between the second half of the twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth century, the brothers erected towers which included most of the functional areas necessary for the practice of a common religious life and which no doubt contributed to the expression of an identity brand 2.
