The Making of Europe by Robert Bartlett

Author:Robert Bartlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141927046
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

more numerous than is needed, are sent to the individual Franciscan houses in our kingdom and in the Polish duchies, but the brothers of Slavic tongue are dispersed among foreign nations, where they can do no good. The result is that the souls of the Slavic people are greatly imperilled.

Jakub Swinka, unsurprisingly, took a firm stand on this infiltration and the spread of convents of German brothers. ‘Certain religious,’ he complained, ‘scorn to receive our native-born Poles into their order and love foreigners instead.’ He commanded that the bishops should deprive such religious of any benefices they held. The monasteries had, after all, he asserts, been founded ‘for the salvation of the local people’. Sometimes racial exclusivity was even written into the foundation charters of religious houses and charitable institutions. In 1313, for example, Wladyslaw Lokietek of Poland founded a hospital in Brześć (Brest) in Cujavia with the stipulation that ‘the brothers shall keep and maintain no German, cleric or lay, in that house and church’. Twenty years later, when the nationalistic bishop of Prague, John of Drazic, founded an Augustinian house at Roudnice (Raudnitz), he specified: ‘we shall admit no one to this convent or monastery of any nation except a Bohemian [or Czech], born from two Czech-speaking parents’.

The Cistercian order, ‘the first effective international organization in Europe’, as it has been called, flourished in Ireland long before the Anglo-Normans came to conquer and settle. St Malachy, St Bernard’s friend, had brought the first white monks to the country, and Mellifont, the first Irish Cistercian house, was founded in 1142. Mellifont was a prolific mother and most of the Irish houses were of her affiliation. After the English colonization of Ireland began in the late twelfth century, the native Irish kings and chieftains continued to patronize the order. By 1228 there were thirty-four Cistercian houses in Ireland, of which only ten were Anglo-Norman foundations.

Relations between the international order and the Irish houses were, however, strained, and in the first quarter of the thirteenth century culminated in the violence and scandal of the so-called ‘conspiracy of Mellifont’. Cistercian visitors from overseas sent to correct abuses in the Irish Cistercian houses were ignored, mistreated and attacked. Fortifications were erected in the monasteries. Complaints were made that conventual life had completely disappeared among the daughters of Mellifont. Eventually, the chapter-general authorized Stephen of Lexington, abbot of the English Cistercian house of Stanley, to undertake a high-powered visitation, which would quell the opposition, insist on the observance of the regular life, exact obedience and not shun the aid of the secular power if required. In 1228 Stephen implemented this policy. Disciplinary measures were drastic. In the aftermath of his visitation (and that of its precursor of 1227), two houses were suppressed, a half-dozen abbots dismissed, monks from Irish houses distributed among Cistercian monasteries overseas and the pattern of affiliation completely redrawn, with English houses often assuming the place of previous mother houses, especially of Mellifont itself.

Looked at from one point of view, the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.