The monastery of Cluny, on the borders of Aquitaine and Burgundy, was established under the terms of a charter issued by William the Pious, duke of Aquitaine and count of Auvergne, September 11, 910. The conditions of its foundation, set forth in the text of the charter given below, were in many ways typical. The history of the monastery was, however, quite exceptional. During the invasions and civil wars of the latter half of the ninth century, many of the monasteries of western Europe had fallen under the control of unscrupulous laymen who used them mainly to satisfy their greed or ambition, and in consequence by the time that Cluny was founded the standard of monastic life and service had been seriously impaired. The monks had grown worldly, education was neglected, and religious services had become empty formalities. Powerful nobles used their positions of advantage to influence, and often to dictate, the election of bishops and abbots, and the men thus elected were likely enough to be unworthy of their offices in both character and ability. The charter of the Cluny monastery, however, expressly provided that the abbot should be chosen by canonical election, i.e., by the monks, and without any sort of outside interference. The life of the monastery was to be regulated by the Benedictine Rule, though with rather less stress on manual labor and rather more on religious services and literary employment. Cluny, indeed, soon came to be one of the principal centers of learning in western Europe, as well as perhaps the greatest administrator of charity. Another notable achievement of Cluny was the building up of the so-called "Cluny Congregation." Hitherto it had been customary for monasteries to be entirely independent of one another, even when founded by monks sent out from a parent establishment. Cluny, however, kept under the control of her own abbot all monasteries founded by her agents and made the priors of these monasteries directly responsible to him. Many outside abbeys were drawn into the new system, so that by the middle of the twelfth century the Cluny congregation was comprised of more than two thousand monasteries, all working harmoniously under a single abbot-general. The majority of these were in France, but there were many also in Spain, Italy, Poland, Germany, and England. It was the Cluny monks who gave the Pope his chief support in the struggle to free the Church from lay investiture and simony and to enforce the ideal of a celibate clergy. This movement for reform may properly be said, indeed, to have originated with the Cluniacs and to have been taken up only later by the popes, chiefly by Gregory VII. By the end of the eleventh century Cluniac discipline had begun to grow lax and conditions were gradually shaped for another wave of monastic reform, which came with the establishment of the Carthusians (in 1084) and of the Cistercians (in 1098).