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Origin and history

The former Chassaing Commanderie, also known as Chauliac, is a priory dependent on the Abbey of La Chaise-Dieu, located in the Broc (Puy-de-Dôme). Founded in the middle of the 13th century, this small building consists of a house and a chapel, the latter having been raised in an ancient era. The lower room on the ground floor, adjacent to the north side of the chapel, formed with it the primitive nucleus of the priory, which grew in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The west facade features a rectangular turret, a rounded turret, and a primitive entrance to the chapel surmounted by a quadrilobed rosace.

The chapel houses murals dating from the late 13th or early 14th century, initially covering all the walls. The choir, decorated on three levels, retains a superior register representing kneeling ornaments and a figure of Saint John the Baptist, patron saint of the chapel. The vault, partially erased, suggests a coat of arms of the order of Malta and a Christ to the tetramorph. A trilobed gothic window, modified to serve as an entrance to the upper floors, testifies to subsequent transformations.

Inside, a spiral staircase serves the lower room, the apartments of the 14th–15th centuries and the attic. Each landing has a wall niche with a hole to place a candle. The northern facade, once flanked by two rectangular towers, only preserves one today. Classified as a Historic Monument in 2010, the Commandory illustrates medieval religious architecture linked to hospital orders, combining spiritual and residential functions.

The site, although partially altered (a collapse of a tower, modifications of the chapel), offers a rare example of rural priory that evolved between the 13th and 15th centuries. The murals, despite their fragmentary state, constitute a valuable testimony of the religious iconography of the time, associated with the devotion to St John the Baptist and the influence of the order of St John of Jerusalem (now Order of Malta).

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