Founding of Cîteaux (1098): Rise of the Cistercian Order

The founding of Cîteaux on 21 March 1098 gave birth to the Cistercian Order, one of the most successful religious movements of the Middle Ages. A small group of monks left the abbey of Molesme to live the Rule of Saint Benedict more strictly in a remote Burgundian marsh. Within a century their “New Monastery” headed a network of hundreds of abbeys from Portugal to Scandinavia.

Background

By the eleventh century Benedictine monasticism was dominated by great houses such as Cluny, famous for elaborate liturgy, splendid churches and vast estates. Some monks felt this had drifted from the simplicity of the original Rule written at Monte Cassino. Reformers across Europe sought poverty, manual labour and solitude.

Robert, abbot of Molesme in Burgundy, was one of them. Frustrated by divisions in his own community, he obtained the support of the papal legate, Archbishop Hugh of Lyon, and left with about twenty monks. Viscount Raynald of Beaune gave them land at Cîteaux, south of Dijon, and Duke Odo I of Burgundy helped them build. They settled there on Palm Sunday, 21 March 1098, the feast of Saint Benedict.

The early years

The beginnings were hard. Within about a year the monks of Molesme secured Robert’s return, and leadership passed to Alberic (abbot 1099–1109), who obtained papal protection. His successor, the Englishman Stephen Harding (abbot 1109–1133), shaped the community’s identity.

Under Harding the monks refused rich gifts such as tithes and serfs, simplified their liturgy and decoration, and wore undyed wool, which earned them the name “white monks”. They admitted lay brothers (conversi), usually illiterate men who took vows and did much of the farm work. The Charter of Charity, approved by Pope Callixtus II in 1119, created a federation in which each mother house visited its daughters every year and all abbots met at Cîteaux in an annual General Chapter.

Bernard of Clairvaux

The order’s fortunes changed in about 1113, when a young Burgundian nobleman, Bernard of Fontaine, arrived with some thirty companions, several of them his relatives. In 1115 Harding sent him to found Clairvaux, which became the most prolific of Cîteaux’s four “elder daughters”, alongside La Ferté (1113), Pontigny (1114) and Morimond (1115).

Bernard became the most influential churchman of his age. He promoted the Knights Templar, helped resolve the papal schism of 1130, attacked the teachings of Peter Abelard and preached the Second Crusade at Vézelay in 1146. One of his own monks became Pope Eugenius III in 1145. Bernard was canonised in 1174.

Spread across Europe

Growth was spectacular. By Bernard’s death in 1153 there were more than 300 Cistercian abbeys; by about 1200, roughly 500. Many were founded in remote valleys, which the monks drained and farmed through networks of outlying farms called granges.

In England the first house was Waverley in Surrey (1128). In 1132 monks from Clairvaux founded Rievaulx in Yorkshire, under the patron Walter Espec, and in the same year a group of reforming monks who left St Mary’s Abbey, York, founded the community that became Fountains Abbey, formally joining the order in 1135. The Yorkshire abbeys became great producers of wool for Flemish and Italian merchants.

Legacy

Cistercian architecture, plain, well-proportioned and without figurative sculpture, spread a recognisable style from Fontenay in France to Alcobaça in Portugal. Cistercians pioneered efficient farming, water management and the wool trade. Their wealth, ironically, later drew criticism, and the English houses were closed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s.

Cîteaux itself was suppressed in 1791 during the French Revolution. Monks returned in 1898, and it is now a house of the Trappists, the strict-observance branch descended from a seventeenth-century reform at La Trappe.

Daily life of the white monks

Cistercian choir monks followed the Rule of Saint Benedict closely. They rose in the night for the first services, spent several hours each day in the communal prayer of the divine office, and devoted the rest to reading and manual work. Meals were plain and largely vegetarian, and silence was kept for most of the day.

The lay brothers lived in a separate wing of the abbey, attended shorter services and carried out most of the farming, building and herding. At their peak they often outnumbered the choir monks: Rievaulx under Abbot Aelred in the 1160s is said to have housed around 140 monks and some 500 lay brothers and lay servants. The system made Cistercian estates highly productive, but it declined after the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when labour became scarce.

Timeline

• 1098, 21 March: Robert of Molesme and his monks settle at Cîteaux.
• 1099: Robert returns to Molesme; Alberic becomes abbot.
• 1109: Stephen Harding becomes abbot.
• c. 1113: Bernard and about thirty companions enter Cîteaux.
• 1115: Bernard founds Clairvaux.
• 1119: Pope Callixtus II approves the Charter of Charity.
• 1132: Rievaulx and Fountains are founded in Yorkshire.
• 1153: Bernard dies; the order has more than 300 abbeys.

Why it matters

Cîteaux showed how a small reform movement could become an international institution through clear rules and central oversight. The Cistercians transformed rural landscapes, monastic architecture and the medieval economy, and through Bernard they shaped the politics and crusades of twelfth-century Europe.