Dobosz, a foremost historian of religious orders in Poland, tells us on page 11 that “My research over the course of the last forty years in Polish, is in this volume for the first time translated and, in several instances, significantly edited.” This brings to a wider audience some of the basic facts about the arrival of new religious groups, including the Grey Monks, as the Cistercians were called there. Nonetheless, some of its arguments are mistaken and it must be read with care.
The conversion of Poland began with a superficial Christianization by elites before 1000 CE, followed by a somewhat grander spread among large groups, which only gradually gave way to a more intensive Christianity. While it was the Grey Monks who may have been those who introduced the notion of written documents, their contributions were not always understood.
There would eventually be seven abbeys of Cistercian monks and nuns in the region as well as a similar number of canons and canonesses. Moreover, contrary to what has been previously believed, the Cistercians were not pioneers of settlement but settled in developed areas (88). In almost all cases, these were not frontier settlements, but had existing estates, managers, and even serfs.
As Dobosz says on page 46, by 1202, at least a dozen communities of canons had been established in the Piast realm. Most of them were somehow related to the Premonstratensian order, but the first to reach the areas under the Piast rule were the Canons Regular of the Lateran. He asserts that the Premonstratensians came to Poland later, probably around the mid-twelfth century, but they quickly gained momentum and were successful in replacing earlier canons.
There are misunderstandings of the standard sources. All the Cistercian abbeys in question are part of the filiation of Morimond. But this does not mean that every new foundation, as Dobosz assumes, was created by sending new monks from Morimond in Burgundy. Indeed there is no evidence of any sending of monks from Burgundy. A filiation line is not identical to a founding house. The more frequent expansion of the Order would have been more local. Overcrowding at an existing Polish house, or the desire by a local donor to found a new house or other local issues would have drawn monks (or nuns) into a new foundation, possibly but not always at a site that had some already existing amenities, an existing church for instance. Monks were not sent from Burgundy.
Other evidence is also misread, as on page 28 where Dobosz describes a written plea from elites to Odilo, “abbot of the Abbey of Saint Gilles in Provence,” a plea from local Polish elites, writing in hope of offspring. But although a son duly arrived, there was no Odilo at Saint-Gilles but instead at Cluny. The story had become garbled.
On pages 78 and 79, Dobosz describes how the Cistercians who established themselves throughout the region had an established infrastructure from the outset. For example, they obtained a seat with a church and most likely provisional monastery buildings from the founder, Simon, Abbot of Lekno. The assumption here is of a failed Benedictine community becoming a Cistercian one, and of this pattern being repeated across the region.
The Grey Monks brought tried and tested models of organization, not only internal ones related to the vita contemplativa, but also economic organization, for instance in the establishment of granges and grange masters reporting back to an official, often the cellerar at a main abbey and church. A monastery often owned people (coloni--probably serfs) and a marketplace to which an immunity was applied (108). Some gifts included rights to salt or salt wells. Others stress the importance of trade routes on which these abbeys were located. Often the assets were extensive, as in the case described on page 83, where he describes how Sulejow received an endowment, which consisted in total of fourteen villages (and farmsteads).
Dobosz wisely opines that there remains considerable confusion about the sequence of events in many cases, particularly because efforts to add a specific right or claim often involved reading that claim back into an earlier act, which in effect made the copy of that earlier act into a forgery. Indeed, there are often forgeries of forgeries. This problem is true even for the so-called general published Cistercian sources, which, as Dobosz explains (84), means that standard sources often cited like Leopold Janauschek’sOriginum cisterciensium did not consistently cite all the earlier sources that Dobosz can find in earlier archives and other depositories.
Thus, Cistercians in Poland did not settle in sparsely inhabited territories, but received highly organized estates, which brought considerable real income into the budgets of those local abbeys. It did not funnel back to more centralized Cistercian centers beyond Poland. This is a picture of the Cistercians and communities of canons and canonesses that is not so different from what historians have recently asserted for other regions.