A Door in Arles

We were walking down a perfectly ordinary shopping street in Arles last July when we noticed this obviously very old - and very expensively made - door. An information board identified it as the door to the Chapel of the Trinitarians of Arles.

The Trinitarians, formally known as the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and of the Captives is a mendicant order of the Catholic Church for men, founded in Cerfroid, outside Paris, in the late 12th century. Tradition says the founder was John de Matha, who settled in Arles in 1199. The founding intention for the order was the ransom of Christians held captive by Muslims as a result of crusading, and of piracy along the Mediterranean coast of Europe.

The orders rules required "the tertia pars" (setting aside one-third of all income) for the paying of ransoms for Christian captives. Ransoming captives required serious economic resources, and fundraising and economic expertise were important aspects of the order's life.

Among the earliest recruits to the order were some Englishmen, and the first to go on the special mission of the order were two English friars who in 1200 went to Morocco and returned to France with 186 liberated Christian captives.

Starting in 1203 the order built a church, a cloister and a cemetery in Arles. In 1630 the monastery was demolished and totally rebuilt. The new buildings served until the Revolution, when they were sold as national property. Only the chapel, and some elements of the cloister survive, the latter as part of the neighboring shops.

We didn't get a chance to visit the chapel, but the door looks really promising.