The notion of a military order that seemed to fuse the two hitherto distinct roles of knight and monk was obviously paradoxical. But it gained acceptance in the Church thanks in large part to the advocacy of Bernard of Clairvaux—the energetic Cistercian abbot whom we met in chapter 6. Bernard and his protégé Pope Eugene III, who became pontiff in 1145, were fascinated by the notion of reforming the decadent institution of knighthood, just as the Cistercians had tried to reform the bloated and indulgent corpus of Benedictine monasticism.
