Letter CCXC. To the Bishop of Ostia about Cardinal Jordan. L

(A.D. 1152.)

Bernard describes the Legate of the Holy See, and what disgraceful traces he had everywhere left behind him.

Your legate has passed from nation to nation and from one kingdom to another people, leaving with us foul and horrid traces everywhere. From the foot of the Alps and the Kingdom of the Teutons this Apostolic man has gone about in every direction through nearly all the churches of France and Normandy, as far as Rouen, and he has filled them not with the Gospel, but with sacrilege. He is said to have done disgraceful things, to have carried off spoils from churches, to have promoted, when he could, boys to ecclesiastical honours writh no other qualifications than their beautiful faces, and, where he could not, to have wished to do it. Many bribed him not to come to them. He exacted and extorted money by his messengers from those to whom he could not go. In the schools, the courts, the very streets, he has made himself a proverb. Seculars, religious, all speak ill of him. The poor, and the monks, and the clergy all complain of him. It is the men, too, of his own profession who are loudest in expressing their abhorrence of his reputation and his life. He has this report, too, both from those within and those without. Not so did John Faperon,¹ not so he whose praise is in the Churches, as of² one who honours his ministry everywhere. Read this letter to my lord. Let him see what is to be done with such a man; I have freed my soul. Yet I say, with my usual rashness, that it will be good for him to purge his court, and so free his conscience. I had determined to say nothing about this, but the venerable Prior of Mont Dieu! impelled me to this, and inspired me to write. Know, too, that I have said less than is openly talked of in public.