The corner-stone of the great papal power, however, was laid by the genius of one man, who organized the monastic sentiment of the sixth century and put it to the support of the Papacy. There had been monks in Italy long before St. Benedict (480-544), but as civil society disintegrated, men in ever greater numbers fled from the world, and sought peace in solitude and in monastic communities. St. Benedict perceived that the monastic rules and customs derived from the East were ill suited to the West; so he devised a monastic system, and formulated his celebrated Rule, which became the pattern for all other monastic rules in Europe. He founded a monastery at Subiaco, a little village near Rome, and afterwards the famous abbey on Monte Cassino, a high hill midway between Rome and Naples, which became the mother of all Benedictine monasteries and shone like a light in the Dark Ages. Benedict's ideal was to help men shut themselves off from the temptations of life and realize, as far as they could, the prayer "Thy kingdom come ... on earth as it is in Heaven." He ordained community of property, and required a novitiate. Most strictly he forbade idleness, and with special insistence exhorted his brethren to till the ground with their own hands. Intellectual interests followed; and Benedictine monks became the teachers not only of agriculture, but of handicraft, of art and learning. His Order spread fast over Italy and Gaul, and in time over Spain, England, and Germany. Its communities, like the old _castra romana_, upheld the authority of Rome and enforced her dominion. The attractions of the monastic life at Monte Cassino are well set out in a letter written (after St. Benedict's day) to one of the abbots, by a man of the world who had once lived there: "Though great spaces separate me from your company, I am bound to you by a clinging affection that can never be loosed, nor are these short pages enough to tell you of the love that torments me all the time for you, for the superiors and for the brethren. So much so that when I think about those leisure days spent in holy duties, the pleasant rest in my cell, your sweet religious affection, and the blessed company of those soldiers of Christ, bent on holy worship, each brother setting a shining example of a different virtue, and the gracious talks on the perfections of our heavenly home, I am overcome, all my strength goes, and I cannot keep tears from mingling with the sighs that burst from me. Here I go about among Catholics, men devoted to Christian worship; everybody receives me well, everybody is kind to me from love of our father Benedict, and for the sake of your merits; but compared with your monastery the palace is a prison; compared with the quiet there this life is a tempest."[4]