Conrad of Urach

Conrad of Urach, known in German as Konrad von Urach, was a Cistercian monk, abbot, and cardinal of the Roman Church in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. He was born at the castle of Urach in Swabia, in the southwestern Holy Roman Empire (the site of present-day Bad Urach in Baden-Württemberg, Germany). His father was Count Egino IV of Urach and his mother was Agnes, a daughter of Duke Berthold IV of Zähringen; through this parentage he belonged to the high nobility of Swabia and was connected with several of the great princely houses of the empire. As a young man he entered the Cistercian abbey of Villers in Brabant, in the Low Countries, and there took the habit of the White Monks. He became prior of Villers and, around 1209, was elected its abbot. His reputation for austerity and for capable governance spread within the order.

In 1214 the community of Clairvaux, the celebrated Burgundian abbey associated with Saint Bernard, elected Conrad as abbot. Three years later, in 1217, he was chosen abbot of Cîteaux, the mother house of the Cistercians, and thereby became the effective head of the entire order, which by the early thirteenth century comprised hundreds of monasteries throughout Latin Europe. In 1219 Pope Honorius III named him cardinal-bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina, one of the suburbicarian sees of Rome. Conrad then resigned the abbacy of Cîteaux in order to serve the Roman Church. As a cardinal he was repeatedly employed as a papal legate. He was sent into the kingdom of France in the years around 1220 in connection with the Albigensian Crusade in Languedoc, where he preached the cross, held synods, and attempted to restore ecclesiastical discipline in a land marked by heresy and prolonged warfare. He was later active as a legate in Germany, promoting the crusade and handling negotiations that touched the difficult relationship between the papacy and the emperor Frederick II.

When Honorius III died in March 1227, Conrad stood high in the regard of his fellow cardinals and was widely considered a possible successor. Medieval reports state that he refused the papal office, whether from humility, from consciousness of physical weakness, or from unwillingness to accept so heavy a burden. The electors then chose Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia, who took the name Gregory IX. Soon afterward Conrad set out on another mission connected with the emperor’s delayed crusading vow. He died at Bari, in Apulia in the kingdom of Sicily, on 30 September 1227. His remains were carried to Clairvaux and buried in the abbey he had once governed.

Within the Cistercian Order Conrad came to be venerated as a blessed, and his memory has been kept on 30 September, the day of his death. He was never Bishop of Rome and never held a patriarchal see of the Eastern churches. He lived as a professed monk and cardinal and is not recorded as having married or having had children. Later Cistercian tradition praised his personal poverty, his reluctance to seek high office, and his labors as abbot and legate. His career belongs to the period in which the Cistercians, already a mature international order, supplied the papacy with abbots, cardinals, and diplomats for the great enterprises of crusade and the suppression of heresy in the early thirteenth century.