The daughters of Cîteaux: how five abbeys covered Europe

The New Monastery

It all begins with a quarrel among monks. Robert, born near Troyes c. 1028, had founded Molesme Abbey c. 1075, in a forest of the Châtillonnais, with a handful of hermits who wanted to live the Rule of Saint Benedict to the letter: poverty, manual work, an office without the additions that Cluny had loaded onto it. Molesme prospers, receives lands, tithes and serfs, and in some twenty years becomes what its founders had fled. In the spring of 1098, Robert obtains permission to leave from the legate Hugh of Die, and quits Molesme with twenty-one monks, among them his prior Alberic and an Englishman, Stephen Harding. They stop five leagues south of Dijon, in a marshy hollow of the Saône plain that Duke Odo I of Burgundy and the viscount of Beaune give up to them, and there they raise a wooden monastery. Tradition sets the settlement on 21 March 1098, the feast of Saint Benedict, which that year fell on Palm Sunday. They do not call the place Cîteaux but Novum Monasterium, the New Monastery; the name of Cîteaux, whose etymology is still debated, only prevails later.