1 - The ‘desert-place called Cîteaux’

Summary

After these things, supported by so distinguished and so important an authority, the aforesaid abbot and his own returned to Molesme, and from that fraternity of monks selected from their own company devotees of the Rule, so that between those who had spoken to the legate in Lyon and the others called from the monastery, there were twenty-one monks; and thus escorted by so goodly a company they headed eagerly for the desert-place called Cîteaux.

The monastery which became known as Cîteaux lay within the duchy of Burgundy, in the heart of the fragmented Middle Kingdom, or Lotharingia. Ruled by the semi-autonomous dukes, the region had seen the emergence of movements, such as the Peace of God and the Truce of God, designed to curb private warfare. It had also seen the foundation of monasteries, notably Cluny, and the alienation of property to them, which allowed them to prosper. Located on the fringes of the kingdom of the Capetian kings of France to the west, and the German lands to the east, Burgundy was on one of the main routes south into Italy. Remote it was not. Yet it was here that Cîteaux was founded and flourished, claiming to be a community that strenuously upheld the Rule of St Benedict, and, moreover, to be a desert place, a wilderness, ‘removed from populated areas’.

The foundation of Cîteaux: the historical debate

For students of Cistercian history there is one plain, but all too familiar, fact of life: to turn one’s back on the subject, even for a moment, is to lose the plot.

David Robinson’s comment on the enduring appeal of the Cistercians to scholars of all disciplines – and the difficulties it can cause – was in 2006, and is still, an appropriate one. In recent years, however, it has been the very nature of the Cistercian movement in its first half century and beyond, and the emergence of the Cistercian ‘Order’, that have caused most controversy. To a large extent the problems are embedded in the documentary sources themselves, and an appreciation of those sources must be our starting point.

The narrative sources

At one time it seemed as if the story of the origins and growth of Cistercian monasticism represented one of the ‘certainties’ of medieval scholarship.