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The late 800s and early 900s were not a good time for Western Europe. From Rome to the French Riviera and south to Sicily, towns and monasteries reeled from repeated raids by pillaging, enslaving Saracen (Muslim) pirates. North of the Alps, royal government under Charlemagne's successors wavered and faltered, leaving the monasteries along rivers vulnerable to Viking raiders and northern slavers.

These were the real "Dark Ages." In what we now know as France, local strongmen simply took matters into their own hands. Christian discipline suffered. Worship became haphazard. The church nearly succumbed to factions and to the greed of secular rulers who tried to dominate it.

Under these circumstances, the "unceasing" round of prayer that had characterized monks from the beginning became the shaft of light and hope in the darkness. Nowhere was this more evident than at Cluny, located in west-central France. Protected by geography, it was out of reach of invaders coming up the Rhône, Seine, Loire, or Garonne rivers.

Benedict's Rule had outlined a balanced life of work and prayer, but in a tottering world beset by anxiety, Cluny focused attention almost entirely on the stable rock of prayer as the "work of God" par excellence. At this immense monastic complex on great feast days, the monks prayed nearly without ceasing.

When Duke William I of Aquitaine founded the monastery at Cluny in 910, he chose for its leader Berno, the abbot of Baume, a Benedictine monastery in the Jura mountains west of the Rhône basin. Baume had maintained the strict Benedictine life promoted by Benedict of Aniane under imperial sponsorship a century earlier. In a bold move, Duke William deliberately forfeited future control over his new foundation—ensuring that Cluny would be free of the secular powers that controlled much of the church at that time.

In a charter dated September 11, Duke William wrote, "For the love of God and of our Savior Jesus Christ, I give and deliver to the Apostles Peter and Paul," in other words, to the pope, "the village of Cluny" and all the lands belonging to it "on condition that a Regular Monastery be established." He thereby placed the monks under the only real protection that mattered: the court of heaven in the person of the two great apostle-martyrs of Rome. He also stipulated freedom from oversight by the nearby bishop. Although William of Aquitaine could not have known it, the single monastic house he founded at Cluny set the switches for a millennium of monastic life.

Abbots grounded in Baume's solid Benedictine life guided Cluny in its formative first three decades. Cluny became a massive, self-sufficient monastic complex and soon came to be seen as a model monastery. Its flourishing life of prayer helped spark what are known as the "Benedictine centuries" (900-1100) and stimulated Benedictine reform and renewal from Spain and Italy to

Germany and England. Existing monasteries seeking to return to their first fervor came under Cluny's authority (67 of them by the early 1000s). The mother monastery's piecemeal addition of new daughter houses (called "priories") produced what church historian C. H. Lawrence described as a "ramshackle spiritual empire."

What was life like for the Benedictines of Cluny in the later 900s and 1000s? Historian Joan Evans gives us a vivid picture in her book Monastic Life at Cluny, 910-1157 (Oxford, 1931). Time was measured not in hours on a clock but in hours of prayer. During the long nights from November to Easter, the night office (Vigils) began at two in the morning; during the spring and fall, it began before dawn as a prelude to morning prayer. When the bell rang for Matins, monks got out of bed, dressed, and washed in the cloister before proceeding to the abbey church. Cluny observed strict silence 24/7, except for a half-hour in the morning and a few minutes at midday.

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