With all their importance, the Crusades were only one aspect of the great religious and intellectual movement that heralded the twelfth century throughout the length and breadth of Western Europe, and was as directly a result of the triumph of the Hildebrandine ideal as the new theories themselves were an emanation from the Cluniac revival. Beginning with the strenuous careers of Gregory VII. and Urban II., this new spirit at once began to work powerfully on Europe, and reached its height in the days of peace that succeeded the end of the Investiture Contest. [Sidenote: The monastic revival.] A monastic revival succeeded, as it preceded, the reformation of the Papacy. At first the movement was on the old lines, and Cluny still maintained its reputation, and increased its number of offshoots. But the ‘Congregation of Cluny’ was too unelastic to be capable of indefinite expansion, and its influence was perhaps widest felt in those houses which adopted its ideal without giving up their ancient Benedictine independence. [Sidenote: Hirschau.] Conspicuous among such was Hirschau, a convent situated on the north-eastern slopes of the Black Forest, in Swabia, where Abbot William introduced the rule of Cluny in 1077, and which immediately became a centre of monastic reformation in southern Germany, though the congregation of Hirschau never attained the organisation or permanence of that of Cluny. [Sidenote: Cluny.] The weak point of the Cluniac system was that everything depended upon the abbot. Under the unworthy Pontius (1109–1125), whom kinship to Paschal II. had brought to the headship of Cluny at an exceedingly early age, discipline declined, the old simplicity disappeared, and the abbot, whose virtues were those of a feudal noble rather than a true monk, wasted his energies in conflicts with the Bishop of Macon, who, in spite of papal exemptions, strove to reform the declining house as diocesan. But under the famous abbot, Peter the Venerable, Cluny again became a power in Europe, though its old influence was never restored. Younger houses, organised on newer lines, divided among themselves the reverence once felt for it, and even Peter of Cluny was overshadowed by Bernard of Clairvaux.