Robert de Turlande

Robert de Turlande, known in later devotion as Saint Robert of Chaise-Dieu, was born about the year 1001 at the castle of Turlande in the Auvergne, in the present-day commune of Saint-Paulien in the French department of Haute-Loire. He belonged to a family of the local nobility. In childhood and adolescence he received a clerical education at the chapter school of the basilica of Saint-Julien in Brioude, then one of the foremost churches of the region and a centre of pilgrimage. He entered the college of canons there and was ordained priest. Medieval accounts, which must be used with the caution due to hagiography, describe him as already marked by fasting, night prayer, and open-handed charity; he is said to have given away much of his patrimony to the poor rather than live as a landed noble cleric.

In the climate of eleventh-century ecclesiastical reform, Robert grew dissatisfied with the customs of a wealthy secular chapter. He left Brioude to seek a stricter life. After a period that sources present as eremitical, he established himself, together with two companions, in a forested and thinly populated district of the Livradois mountains. The settlement, begun in the early 1040s and conventionally dated to 1043, was named Casa Dei, the House of God, which in French became La Chaise-Dieu. Disciples gathered around the hermits. Robert gave the community the Rule of Saint Benedict and thereby founded a Benedictine monastery of which he was the first abbot. Local aristocrats, including members of the house of the counts of Auvergne, endowed the new abbey with lands and rights, and the house expanded with unusual rapidity for a foundation in a relatively poor upland region.

As abbot, Robert was remembered for combining monastic discipline with hospitality and care for the sick and the destitute who came to the monastery. La Chaise-Dieu became the mother house of a substantial congregation of priories and dependent monasteries spread through the Massif Central and neighbouring provinces, an independent Benedictine family distinct from Cluny though part of the same broader reform movement. Robert died at the abbey on 17 April 1067 and was buried in its church. Veneration at his tomb began soon afterwards, and reports of miracles were collected. His feast is kept on 17 April, the day of his death, and he was entered in the Roman Martyrology as the abbot-founder of Casa Dei.

The abbey he had founded remained a major religious and artistic centre. In the fourteenth century it enjoyed the special favour of Pope Clement VI, who was a native of the nearby Limousin, promoted the rebuilding of the abbey church in the Gothic style, and was himself buried there. Tradition and many later Catholic reference works attribute to Clement VI the canonization of Robert in 1351. Whether that act was a formal canonization in the later juridical sense or a solemn confirmation of an already existing cult, Robert has been honoured as a saint in the Catholic Church from the later Middle Ages onward. The great abbey church at La Chaise-Dieu, often called the abbatiale Saint-Robert, still stands as the principal monument associated with his memory.