Pope Eugenius III

Pope Eugene III (Latin Eugenius III), born Bernardo and commonly called Bernardo of Pisa, was Bishop of Rome from 1145 until his death in 1153 and the first Cistercian monk to hold the papacy. His exact year of birth is unknown; he belonged to the later eleventh century. Later genealogies that attached him to the Neapolitan Pignatelli family are generally rejected by historians as unfounded. He served as a canon of the cathedral of Pisa before being drawn to Cistercian monasticism under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux. He entered Clairvaux in the 1130s. Bernard later sent him to Italy, and about 1140 he became abbot of the Cistercian house of Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio alle Tre Fontane on the outskirts of Rome.

On 15 February 1145, after the death of Pope Lucius II, the cardinals elected Abbot Bernardo although he was not himself a cardinal. He took the name Eugene III. Rome was then in the grip of a communal republic, encouraged by the preacher Arnold of Brescia, that rejected papal temporal rule. Eugene had to leave the city at once and received episcopal consecration at the abbey of Farfa. Much of his pontificate was spent in exile at Viterbo, Siena, and other places in Italy and France while he tried to recover the city and the Papal States.

The act for which he is best known is the proclamation of the Second Crusade. After the fall of Edessa to Zengi in 1144 he issued the bull Quantum praedecessores in December 1145, calling Latin Christendom to take the cross, and entrusted the preaching of the expedition to Bernard of Clairvaux. Kings Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany responded, but the crusade of 1147–1149 failed in Anatolia and before Damascus. Eugene also pursued ecclesiastical reform, holding synods at Paris, Trier, Reims and elsewhere, confirming privileges of the military orders, and remaining in close correspondence with Bernard, who addressed to him the treatise De consideratione on the spiritual perils of the papal office.

He re-entered Rome on several occasions, including in 1149, but conflict with the commune continued. He died at Tivoli on 8 July 1153 and was buried in St. Peter's Basilica. In 1872 Pope Pius IX confirmed his cult and beatified him. His feast is kept on 8 July. He is remembered as a reforming Cistercian pope, as the close associate of Bernard of Clairvaux, and as the pontiff who launched the Second Crusade.