15

SEVEN YEARS EARLIER. CLAIRVAUX. A SPECIAL MOMENT ON JUNE 24 . . .

As if the young abbot did not already have enough on his plate, four years after founding Clairvaux, Bernard fostered a relationship with an even younger Afonso Henriques.

The Cistercian monastic chronicles record how, in a moment of meditation on the feast day of John the Baptist, Bernard de Clairvaux was shown another monastery that was to be founded in the western-most part of the Iberian peninsula. After a few days of reflection he gathered eight monks—Boemund, Aldebert, Jean, Bernard, Alderic, Cisinand, Alano, and Brother Roland—and briefed them: “The purpose of your journey will be to found a monastery, to be inhabited by the laws of heaven, so that the inhabitants of the earth may be risen, and those who will inhabit its walls will find the right remedies for their souls, and in doing so they will be shown the road to glory.”¹

He told them they were to travel to where a sign from the heavens would present itself, then turned to Brother Gerald and asked the bursar of Clairvaux to organize the necessary provisions for their journey. Much crying was done by all at the time of farewell, for the trip would take them eight hundred miles away and beyond their known world.²

The itinerant monks followed one of the preferred pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, finally reaching the town of Lamego, home to the second oldest Visigothic chapel in Europe, forty miles to the southwest of Braga. Their instructions were to meet with a colleague of Bernard’s, the hermit João Cirita, to whom they would hand a personal letter from the abbot.

João’s virtues and reputation were well known in the nearby Portuguese court of Guimarães. After reading the letter, he and the eight monks walked the 33 miles to the royal court and solicited permission to build a monastery from the heir to the Portuguese throne, Afonso Henriques.

Upon reading the name on the letter, the eleven-year-old was so overjoyed that he kissed the hems of the monks’ habits; after all, this was probably the first letter Afonso had received from his uncle Bernard de Clairvaux.³

Attentively watching was Afonso’s half brother Dom Pedro, who “asked the monks many questions about France and Bernard, and as he learned more about this distant family connection and how they shared similar ideals, he took an interest in journeying to France one day to discover the noble bloodline in whose footsteps he proceeded.” When Dom Pedro grew up he would do just so.⁴

Afonso promptly awarded the monks the property they sought and put his name on the vellum deed, signed on his behalf on March 1, 1120, by his then legal guardian, Countess Tareja.⁵ The contented monks were bid farewell and returned promptly to Lamego to built a hermitage in a solitary valley at Tarouca,⁶ exactly in accordance with Cistercian principles of personal comfort in a valle silvestri et horrida (rough and wild valley). Most likely it would have comprised a hut made of planks of wood covered with the stalks of wild plants that passed for a church, with no bed linen, nor any of the sweet things in life for the monks.⁷ When the building was gradually elevated in construction and status to the monastery of John the Baptist, thirteen novices joined from the Portuguese court.⁸