Bernard founds Clairvaux: the rise of the Cistercians

The abbey of Cîteaux, south of Dijon, was founded on 21 March 1098 by Robert of Molesme and monks who felt that the Cluniac communities had abandoned the rigour and simplicity of the Rule of St Benedict; its third abbot, Stephen Harding, framed the order's constitution, the Charter of Charity. In 1113 Bernard, a young Burgundian nobleman, entered Cîteaux with some thirty relatives and friends, and new houses followed: La Ferté (1113), Pontigny (1114), Morimond and Clairvaux (1115). Bernard and twelve monks were sent to the Vallée d'Absinthe, which his kinsman Count Hugh of Troyes had given to the order; he named it Clairvaux, the "bright valley" (by tradition on 25 June 1115), and William of Champeaux, bishop of Châlons, made him abbot.

The beginnings were austere, but recruits flocked to Bernard, and in his lifetime more than sixty monasteries were founded from Clairvaux all over Europe, as far as Scandinavia. The Cistercians wore habits of undyed wool, built churches without ornament — in his Apologia Bernard mocked the carved monsters of monastic cloisters (traditionally read as an attack on Cluny), where it was "more pleasant to read the marble than the books" — worked their estates with lay brothers (conversi) and used water power in practically every monastery. By 1152 there were 333 Cistercian abbeys, so many that a halt was put to new foundations. Bernard became the most influential churchman of his day: he outlined the rule of the Templars at the Council of Troyes in January 1129 (often dated 1128), backed Innocent II in the schism of 1130 and preached the Second Crusade. He died on 20 August 1153 and was canonized in 1174; Clairvaux, dissolved during the Revolution, became a prison in 1808.