The Prince and the Priors: Carthusian Monasticism and the Experience of State-Building in Angevin Provence, 1245-1385

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationships between monastic institutions,

princes, and bureaucrats in the period from 1200 to 1400. Charles of Anjou’s forty-year

reign as count of Provence (1245-1285) and king of Sicily was a time of intense

administrative and fiscal centralization, territorial expansion, and economic growth. This

dissertation tells the story of the Angevin administration through the lens of the

Carthusian monasteries of Provence using monastic charter evidence, chancery

documents, and inquisition records. It argues that monasteries functioned as political

communities, cultivated networks of royal patrons, and cooperated with the kings of

Naples in the Angevin project of extending sovereignty and consolidating jurisdiction in

the medieval Mediterranean. This dissertation examines how these new royal claims

disturbed the fragile rural political economy in the countryside surrounding medieval

monasteries. When peasants attacked monks and slandered royal officials, they were not

only fighting for their right to sustenance and use of agrarian resources but were

protesting a worldview that considered monastic property as a space apart. Monasteries

and princes worked together by employing a language of power and protection that

combined the secular “peace of the prince” with the church’s “monastic peace” to justify

royal intervention in religious spaces and exert control over co-lords and the local

peasantry.