Turin by Pope Calixtus II (1119–1124). There was a house of the Knights Templar in Asti, called the Domus Hospitalis Soldani, as early as 1182; it belonged to the Lombard province and came to an end, along with the Templars, in 1312. In the 14th century, the city of Asti became subject to the Kings of Naples, and then to the Visconti of Milan. Galeozzo Visconti gave Asti to Louis of Valois, Duke of Orleans, son of King Charles V of France. Asti became part of the French kingdom until it was handed over to the Duchy of Savoy in 1575. The French Republic and Napoleonic Empire During the French occupation, between 1802 and 1805, Piedmont was annexed to metropolitan France and divided into six departments: Ivrea or Doire (Dora), Marengo, Po or Eridan, Sofia, Stura, and Tanaro. Asti was made the capital of the French department of Tanaro. At the imperial reorganization in 1805 and then from 1805 to 1814 it was part of the department of Marengo, whose capital was at Alessandria. The department was under the jurisdiction of a French Prefect. The French government, in the guise of ending the practices of feudalism, confiscated the incomes and benefices of the bishops and priests and made them employees of the state, with a fixed income and the obligation to swear an oath of loyalty to the French constitution. As in metropolitan France, the government program also included reducing the number of bishoprics and making them conform as far as possible with the civil administration's "departments". In accordance with the Concordat of 1801, and at the demand of the First Consul N. Bonaparte, Pope Pius VII was compelled to issue the bull Gravissimis causis (1 June 1803), in which the number of dioceses in Piedmont was reduced from seventeen to eight: Turin, Vercelli, Ivrea, Acqui, Asti, Mondovi, Alessandria and Saluzzo. The details of the new geographical divisions were left in the hands of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Caprara, the Papal Legate in Paris. In 1805 the diocese of Alba (Pompeia) was suppressed and its territory was entrusted to the Bishop of Asti. Cardinal Caprara issued his instructions for the reordering of the parishes of the diocese of Asti on 23 January 1805. When Bishop Pietro Arborio Gattinara died in January 1809, the Emperor of the French, Napoleon I, nominated as bishop of Asti François-André Dejean, but he could not obtain