The chapel at the corner of two streets grew into a “court city” with living quarters and land. Which sounds very much as the compound of a (miltary) Order in town. It is not clear whether this expansion came about during the reign of the Templar Order (until 1317), or after that when the Hospitallers had taken over. Some sources even doubt whether there was at all a Templar chapel before the Hospitallers took over.
On July 23, 1543 the (than Hospitaller) chapel fell victim to the second big city fire. The fire even started at the Sint-Janskapel. Because the wind came from the southwest, the entire city centre was destroyed, except for the part that had already burned down in 1490 and was afterwards rebuilt in stone. The fire also spread over a part of the Gasthuiseinde (Boschstraat). In addition to the Sint-Janskapel, the Gasthuiskerk, the convent of the Black Sisters (Zwarte Zusters), the Wendelinuskapel and the convent Sint-Catharinadal burned down, except for the church and the sleeping quarters of the nuns.
On the same site the Knights of Saint-John built another chapel. In 1594 this chapel was converted into the Hoofdwacht (“Main Guardhouse”) for the garrison. The defense of the fortress was coordinated from this building.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, plans were made to build a new main guardhouse in the middle of the Grote Markt. In 1766, the Council of State decided to locate the new building on the site of the older Main Guardhouse. The new building was provided with an arched gallery of Tuscan hardstone columns, which was placed outside the building line. In the nineteenth century, this extension was demolished and the columns were placed in the facade.
In 1996, the building was sold by the State of the Netherlands and furnished as a shop which nowadays houses a restaurant. So what remains is the site of what earlier was a Templar-Hospitaller chappel and compound.
Find all the proven, probable and possible Templar sites defined bij Dr Brus in The Netherlands on this map.
This blog quotes, with permission, and some adaptations most of the entry on Breda on the valuable website on the Templars in the Netherlands by Dr Brus. Additional information was derived from erfgoed-breda-nl. The illustration shows de Hoofdwacht at Breda, as it was in 1962. source, Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, 1962, (Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0).
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