Cistercians (Order of Citeaux)

The Cistercians are the great medieval reform of Benedictine monasticism, founded on the conviction that the older monasteries had drifted from the plain sense of the Rule.

A stricter return

The order began in 1098 when Robert of Molesme led a group of monks to a marshland site called Citeaux in Burgundy, seeking a stricter and simpler observance than the wealthy and elaborate monasticism of the day allowed. The reform stripped away the accumulated ceremony and ornament, restored manual labour to the centre of the life, and settled the houses in remote and undeveloped country, so that clearing and farming the land became part of the discipline. The white undyed habit distinguished the reformed monks from the black-robed Benedictines they had left.

Expansion and its cost

The order spread with extraordinary speed in the twelfth century, carried above all by the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, and it became a European institution with a network of daughter houses bound to their mothers by an annual visitation and general chapter, a constitutional apparatus that was itself an innovation. The same efficiency that cleared the wastes made the abbeys rich, and the wealth in time drew the very criticism the founders had made of others, so that the Cistercians in their turn generated the stricter reform of the Trappists. The pattern by which austerity brings prosperity and prosperity invites reform runs through the whole history of the order.

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.