The Templars and the Parisian Builders 111who were dependents of the royal provostship, and the tutelary action
of the Order was so powerful, that the Templars can be credited with
the transformation of the hansa, home to the Hanseatic League of Paris,
into a municipality under Saint Louis, with freedoms and an adminis-
tration that it helped to develop further.^9 In support of this theory, we
can note that the seat of municipal government was originally located
within the Templar censive district.
The religious seat of the Order, where the worship ceremonies of
the Brotherhood were performed, was the Sainte Madeleine Church on
the rue de la Juiverie, in the cite. This street, which was originally part
of the censive and justice district of the Saint Eloi Priory and the order
of Saint Eloi, had passed into Templar possession following the agree-
ment reached by the two orders in 1175. As for the church, it was a for-
mer synagogue that had been converted in 1183, when Philip Augustus
had driven out the Jews. It was in this church where the Brotherhood
of Water Merchants would meet, followed by the Great Brotherhood of
the Bourgeois of Paris around 1205. Abbe Lebeuf indicates that the
church was not a dependency of any secular or regular body.^10 Such a
franchise, irreconcilable with feudal law, could have been conferred
only by the lord high justice of the Templars. The Great Brotherhood
had its own censive district and an enclave in the Jacobin area near the
rue Saint Jacques, the Clos des Bourgeois.
It seems that the office of the Brotherhood, what we could call its
temporal seat, was originally in the Templar censive district, in the
Maison de la Marchandise [Merchandise House] in the Valley of
Misery, bordering the Seine to the west of the grand Chatelet. It was
then transferred in 1246 to the Parloir aux Bourgeois, between the
grand Chatelet and Saint Leufroy, still in the Templar censive district. It
was in 1357 that the municipality was installed in the Maison aux
Piliers [Column House], bought from the dauphin and located on the
Place de Greve, neighboring the Templar domain.*
* It seems an error to place the Parloir aux Bourgeois of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries on the left bank near the former Saint Jacques Gate. Cf. Rochegude,
Promenades dans toutes les rues de Paris, rue Soufflot, no. 2 (Paris: Denoel, 1958);
J. Hillairet, Evocation du vieux Paris (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1952), 128, 189, and
501.