revenues; their scattered properties were becoming inadequate to support the
lifestyle of grand consumption and ceremony as a market economy began to
compete with their fixed sources of income. The new wave of monasteries was
more ascetic and economically rationalized than the first.
The Augustinian canons arose in towns, where they lived on donations of
tithes and small rental properties; their base of support had shifted to the minor
gentry and the middle class, which now had enough property to invest in
religious status on a modest scale. The Cistercians continued to recruit from
the aristocracy, but now they militantly pursued organizational independence.
They were rigidly ascetic. Illicit marriages were cut off, emphasizing the sepa-
ration of their order from the family ties which had previously been their
principal support. They abjured ostentatious ritual and refused to carry out
funerals and masses for the laity. Instead, as a source of income they took
donations of property without strings attached; to work their land they re-
cruited a subordinate rank of lay brothers as religious serfs, who were re-
warded for their discipline by a minor share in the status of religious life. Like
a number of other new orders, the Cistercians were involved in military
Crusades, but above all they expanded the agricultural cultivation of Europe
into the frontiers (Spain, Scotland, eastern Europe) and onto wastelands and
mountains. Their emphasis on action rather than ritual made them economi-
cally productive, while their asceticism prevented them from investing in con-
sumption and display and motivated them to plow back their gains into further
expansion. The Cistercians are a case of the Weberian Protestant ethic in
Catholic and corporate guise. Their monasteries became large landowners,
buying up intervening parcels and consolidating properties. Their rationalized
agriculture spilled over into wool production, mining, mills, and ironworks.
The Cistercians were the most spectacular organizational expansion of the
period (see Figure 9.2), but monastic growth was shared by other new orders.
Taking advantage of a new market economy, they become a major impetus in
economic expansion (Gimpel, 1976).
The papacy expanded organizationally on the growth of the monasteries.
In the early Middle Ages, the church was part of the feudal dispersion of power.
Bishops acted as territorial princes, and were closely entwined with the politics
of local aristocracies (Morrison, 1969: 266, 354, 387–388). The papacy’s main
power was as local ruler in central Italy; its controversies with the emperor
over supreme authority did not extend much beyond doctrinal claims over each
other’s domain, and neither side effectively controlled the clerical aristocracy.
The seat of the pope at Rome was little more than an honorific center contain-
ing the relics of Saint Peter, which constituted a physical symbol of the trans-
mission of charismatic authority; but it had no far-reaching organizational
apparatus, and its ties to most of Christendom were primarily as a focal point456 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths