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The Myth of the White Monks’ “Mission to the Orthodox”: Innocent III, the Cistercians, and the Greeks

In the early thirteenth century, numerous Cistercian monasteries were founded in the former Byzantine territories conquered in the context of the Fourth Crusade. According to the standard narrative, put forth in the 1970s, Pope Innocent III sent the Cistercians on a “mission to the Orthodox,” but the mission was a failure, because the White Monks soon abandoned almost all of their houses in Frankish Greece and Constantinople without having “converted” the Greeks. In the light of recent research on the aftermath of 1204 and on the Cistercian Order, this paper argues that the Frankish rulers took the initiative to found Cistercian monasteries in the Greek East for the same reason that they did so in the Latin West: to cater to the Latin rite aristocracy. This Cistercian mission was a success, since the Cistercian establishments in Greece generally existed as long as the Western nobility survived to patronize and protect them. There is no evidence that Innocent intended the Cistercians to be missionaries in Romania since, contrary to a once common assumption, the papacy did not view the Greeks as requiring the same kind of missionary activity that was deemed necessary in lands inhabited by pagans or heretics.