One Monk's Recruiting Turned a Reform into an Empire

Citeaux might have remained a single marshland community had Bernard of Clairvaux not joined it a little over a decade after its founding and then spread it with extraordinary speed. Bernard entered the order around 1113, was sent to found Clairvaux as its own abbey by 1115, and spent the following decades founding and inspiring further houses until, by his death in 1153, the Cistercians counted hundreds of monasteries across Europe, a growth rate no other monastic reform of the period matched.

The order's economic structure grew alongside its numbers: Cistercian houses relied heavily on lay brothers, the conversi, who handled manual labour and outlying farms called granges, letting choir monks concentrate on prayer while the order built a genuinely large agricultural and, in England especially, wool trading enterprise. That same discipline of plain, unornamented building associated with early Cistercian architecture influenced church design well beyond the order's own houses. Growth and prosperity eventually blunted the austerity Citeaux was founded to restore, and it was exactly this drift from the original rigor that later reformers, centuries afterward, pointed to when they broke away to found the stricter observance that became the Trappists.