Events and Templar Discoveries in the 21st Century

History Chapter : 1

The Cistercle and the Temple Foundation

First steps of the Cisterck in Bourgogne and Champagne

The Order of the Cistercian and the Order of the Temple, two religious orders so different, if not so opposite, in their external activities, the first seeking the sanctification of their members through prayer, work and the apartment of the world, the second also seeking the sanctification of their children through prayer, but through military and warrior activity against the infidels in defense and protection of the first pilgrims and of the kingdom of Jerusalem

• On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II appealed in Clermont to the knights of the West to take up arms to the relief of their brothers, the Christians of the East and in defense of the pilgrims oppressed and massacred by the Turks and to set out for Jerusalem.
• On 15 August 1096 the army of the Crusaders was launched, which in the autumn and winter of that same year was concentrated in Constantinople, crossed the Strait of the Dardanelles in the spring of 1097 and finally on 14 May 1097 began the encirclement of the city of Nicaea, already in Asia Minor.

More than two years of hard fighting would be needed to reach the walls of Jerusalem, which finally, after more than a month siege, will be taken to the assault on July 15, 1099; five days earlier the Spanish hero Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the Cid Campeador, had died in Valencia.

On the same days, on March 21, 1098, a monk, gentleman of Burgundy, abbot of San Miguel de Tonnerre first and then founder and abbot of the monastery of Molesme, moves with a group of his monks to a wild and inaccessible place called Cîteaux, Cisterch in Spanish, located about 22 kilometers south of Dijon, the capital of Burgundy in search of greater

Forced by the Archbishop of Lyons and pontifical legacy to return his office of Abbot of Molesme, the monks of the Cisterch chose as new abbot to Alberico that on October 19, 1100 he obtained a bull of Pope Pascual II that placed under the apostolic protection the new abbey and approved his character of exempt from any other dependence.

Alberico, second abbot of the Cister, ruled the new monastery until his death on January 26, 1108; during those eight years of his abbeyzage was instituted and a new genre of life was put into practice more in accordance with the letter and spirit of the rule of St. Benedict.

On the death of Alberico, the Englishman Esteban Harding was elected third abbot of the Cistercian, who had had an important part in the very foundation of the Cisterch, who faithfully maintained the spirit and ideals of his predecessors and the first founding monks and who wrote, with the approval of his brothers the Caritatis Charter, which completed the primitive statutes of Alberico and came to regulate the mutual relations of the mother abbeys

In 1112, at the age of fourteen of his foundation, a 22-year-old Burgundian man was knocking on his doors accompanied by about thirty companions; it was about the future Saint Bernard of Claraval.

• The childhood or foundational stage of the Cistercian had ended; there would have been before the new Order a new era of prodigious growth and expansion, begun with the foundation of four new abbeys in only the following three years: La Ferté (Saône-et-Loire) in 1113, Pontigny (Yonne) in 1114 and Claraval (Aube), where Bernardo will pass as first abbot, and Morimond (Ha

At the death of Esteban Harding in 1136 there were already seventy-five abbeys born from the lush Cistercian tree. Seventeen years later in 1153, the Cistercian monasteries in the West were already about 350, of which 160 came from Claraval and its subsidiaries.