The monastic fame of St. Bernard was established not only by the searching reforms he instituted at Clairvaux among the seceding monks of Cluny and Solesmes, but by the success of the Cistercian colonies he planted in Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark, to the number of seventy-two, according to his historians. [Illustration: 137. ST. ALBAN'S ABBEY (ENGLAND)] [Illustration: 138. ABBEY OF MONTMAJOUR (PROVENCE). CLOISTERS] During his lifetime the poor hermitage of the _Vallée d'Absinthe_ (which name he changed to Claire-Vallée, Clairvaux) had become a vast feudal settlement of many farms and holdings, rich enough to support more than seven hundred monks. The monastery was surrounded by walls more than half a league in extent, and the abbot's domicile had become a seignorial mansion. As the fount of the order, and mother of all the auxiliary houses, Clairvaux was supreme over a hundred and sixty monasteries in France and abroad. Fifty years after the death of St. Bernard the importance of the order had become colossal. During the thirteenth century, and from that time onwards, the Cistercian or Bernardine monks built immense abbeys, and decorated them with royal magnificence. Their establishments contained churches equal in dimension to the largest cathedrals of the period, abbatial dwellings adorned with paintings, and boasting oratories which, as at Chaâlis, were _Stes. Chapelles_ as splendid as that of St. Louis in Paris. The very cellars held works of art in the shape of huge casks elaborately carved. [Illustration: 139. CHURCH AT ELNE IN ROUSSILLON. CLOISTERS] Thus, by a strange recurrence of conditions, the settlements founded on a basis of the most rigorous austerity by the ascetics who had fled from the splendours of Solesmes and Cluny to the forest, became in their turn vaster, richer, and more sumptuous than those the magnificence of which they existed to rebuke. With this difference, however: the ruin brought about by the luxury of the Cistercian establishment was so complete that nothing of their innumerable monasteries was spared by social revolution but a few archæologic fragments and historic memories. [Illustration: 140. ABBEY OF FONTFROIDE (LANGUEDOC). CLOISTERS] The influence of the Cistercian foundation extended to various countries of Europe. It was manifested in Spain, at the great Abbey of Alcobaco, in Estramadura, said to have been built by monkish envoys of St. Bernard; in Sicily, in the rich architectural detail of the Abbey of Monreale; and in Germany, in the foundation of such abbeys as those of Altenberg in Westphalia, and Maulbronn in Wurtemberg. In 1133 Everard, Count of Berg, invited monks of Citeaux to settle in his dominions, and in 1145 they founded a magnificent abbey on the banks of the Dheen, which was held by the Cistercian order down to the period of the Revolution, when it shared the fate of other religious houses.