atholic Dictionary_, art. "Cistercians").

For a hundred years, till the first quarter of the 13th century, the
Cistercians supplanted Cluny as the most powerful order and the chief
religious influence in western Europe. But then in turn their influence
began to wane, chiefly, no doubt, because of the rise of the mendicant
orders, who ministered more directly to the needs and ideas of the new
age. But some of the reasons of Cistercian decline were internal. In the
first place, there was the permanent difficulty of maintaining in its
first fervour a body embracing hundreds of monasteries and thousands of
monks, spread all over Europe; and as the Cistercian very _raison
d'etre_ consisted in its being a "reform," a return to primitive
monachism, with its field-work and severe simplicity, any failures to
live up to the ideal proposed worked more disastrously among Cistercians
than among mere Benedictines, who were intended to live a life of
self-denial, but not of great austerity. Relaxations were gradually
introduced in regard to diet and to simplicity of life, and also in
regard to the sources of income, rents and tolls being admitted and
benefices incorporated, as was done among the Benedictines; the farming
operations tended to produce a commercial spirit; wealth and splendour
invaded many of the monasteries, and the choir monks abandoned
field-work.

The later history of the Cistercians is largely one of attempted
revivals and reforms. The general chapter for long battled bravely
against the invasion of relaxations and abuses. In 1335 Benedict XII.,
himself a Cistercian, promulgated a series of regulations to restore the
primitive spirit of the order, and in the 15th century various popes
endeavoured to promote reforms. All these efforts at a reform of the
great body of the order proved unavailing; but local reforms, producing
various semi-independent offshoots and congregations, were successfully
carried out in many parts in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries.
In the 17th another great effort at a general reform was made, promoted
by the pope and the king of France; the general chapter elected
Richelieu (commendatory) abbot of Citeaux, thinking he would protect
them from the threatened reform. In this they were disappointed, for he
threw himself wholly on the side of reform. So great, however, was the
resistance, and so serious the disturbances that ensued, that the
attempt to reform Citeaux itself and the gen