influence of the Cluniac sensibility. Three monks of Cluny
were even elected bishops of Rome.• The influence of Cluny remained strong until the early 12th century
and even at that date produced a final remarkable leader in Peter
the Venerable (c. 1094–1156). Peter was elected abbot in 1122
and defended Cluny’s commitment to scholarship against another
famous monastic reformer, Bernard of Clairvaux.The Abbey of Cîteaux
• Bernard began as a monk of the second great reforming monastery,
the Abbey of Cîteaux, founded in 1098. The Cistercian monks
sought a more rigorous observance of the Rule of Benedict than
was practiced in communities associated with Cluny.
o Like Cluny, Cîteaux established an order that exercised control
over the reform in its daughter houses. At the start of the 13th
century, there were some 500 monasteries associated with
Cîteaux across Europe and even in the Latin East.
o The ideal of Cîteaux was to locate communities in isolated
places. The mother-house abbey church was begun in 1140
and completed in 1193; the dukes of Burgundy were generous
benefactors of Cîteaux.o The most marked feature of the reform was the embrace of
manual labor as an ideal, returning to the balance between work
and prayer that the Rule had first envisaged. By locating in
remote areas, the Cistercians sought to ensure that agricultural
labor—not labors of the mind—would remain at the center
of the monastic labora. In this sense, it was a reform in the
direction of the primitive.• The most well-known alumnus of Cîteaux was the Cistercian monk
Saint Bernard (1090–1153), who became the most famous—and,
in some respects, contentious—of the reformers in the Benedictine
tradition. Bernard left the monastery of Cîteaux in 1115 to found his
own monastery at Clairvaux and become its first abbot.