A Burgundian Knight's Son at Cîteaux
Bernard was born in 1090 at Fontaine, near Dijon in Burgundy, the third of seven children of Tescelin, a knight in the service of the duke of Burgundy, and his wife Aleth. His mother, devout and much loved, died when he was a youth. Educated by canons at Châtillon-sur-Seine, he turned in his early twenties toward the strictest monastic life he could find.
In 1098 a small band of monks led by Robert of Molesme had founded a new house at Cîteaux, a marshy wilderness south of Dijon, to keep the Rule of Benedict more literally than the great abbeys did. By 1113 the community was struggling to survive. That year Bernard arrived at its gate with about thirty companions, among them several of his brothers and an uncle, whom he had persuaded to join him. The arrival transformed Cîteaux, and the Cistercian order, the white monks, began its astonishing growth.
In 1115 Abbot Stephen Harding sent Bernard, then about twenty-five, with twelve monks to found a daughter house in a valley of Champagne. He named it Clair Vallée, the valley of light, Clairvaux. He ruled it as abbot for thirty-eight years. The early years were harsh, and Bernard's own fasting broke his health for life, but men came in crowds, and from Clairvaux monks went out to found dozens of houses across Europe.
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