For nearly a thousand years the Cistercian and Franciscan religious orders have been active in Europe. When and where were monasteries opened? When did they close? To answer these questions, I’ll use data compiled by Serra Boranbay and Carmine Guerriero and brought to my attention in Jeremy Singer-Vine’s newsletter Data is Plural. This data set includes European monasteries of these two orders founded in the years 1000-1600. Monasteries that opened later or beyond Europe are not included.


Openings

The Order of Cistercian was founded in 1098, branching from the Benedictines. The boom in opening Cistercian monasteries occurred during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Franciscans, a group of related religious orders, was founded in 1209 and continued opening new monasteries into the 16th century. Since the data set includes Franciscan monasteries opened prior to 1209, presumably these older monasteries joined the Franciscans at a later date.

The geographic dispersal of the movement to open monasteries is more visible when looking at historical administrative regions colored by median opening date of the monasteries in each region.


Duration operating

Many Cistercian monasteries operated well over 500 years, the longest-running mainly were located in states in which the Protestant Reformation was not culturally or politically dominant.

The Cistercian opening boom tapered off by 1300; after that most newly founded Cistercian monasteries were outside the core western European Catholic countries. The Franciscans had two major pushes: one in the 12th and 13th centuries, and one in the 15th (pre-reformation).


Closings

The decline was gradual over long periods of time with short-duration cataclysmic political events wiping out most monasteries. Presumably, these were the result of the Roman Church aligning itself with political movements that lost power, and those in power seeing the religious orders as too powerful, too wealthy, or antithetical to Protestant sensibilities. Since I lack closing dates for Franciscan monasteries, I look at only Cistercian closings below.

Sources and limitations

The data for these plots comes from A novel dataset on a culture of cooperation and inclusive political institutions in 90 European historical regions observed between 1000 and 1600 by Serra Boranbay and Carmine Guerriero. 2352-3409/© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2019.104731

Data is Plural newsletter 2019.11.27 edition by Jeremy Singer-Vine. Click here to subscribe.

Wikipedia entries: Cistercians and Franciscans

It’s possible that there are errors and omissions in the data. The data set covers the years 1000-1600. Monasteries opened later or beyond Europe are not included.

For current information

Both orders have spread around the world and remain active. See the orders’ websites for more information:



By Daniel Moul (heydanielmoul via gmail)

CC-BY This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License