The French realm and its dynamic Church played a major role in Eugenius III's pontificate, not least because of the crusade led by King Louis VII, the refuge given to the Roman Curia in 1147–8, the Council of Reims in 1148, and many meetings and letters between the pope, French prelates, and lay lords. As a Pisan, Bernard, elected as Pope Eugenius III in 1145, probably knew French, but did not have a good knowledge of France before his pontificate. It is true that in 1138, abandoning his wealthy cathedral chapter of Pisa, he was attracted by the rough life of prayer, poverty, and penance in the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux in Burgundy, headed since 1115 by the now famous abbot, Bernard. Inside the abbey, however, as a simple monk Bernard was largely kept out of the world. Moreover, he remained in France for less than two years before being sent back to Italy to establish a Cistercian community at the Roman monastery of Tre Fontane (1140–5). Here Bernard had opportunities to deal with affairs generated by the papal court, and might even have met French prelates on their way there, but he was far from France. Yet during Eugenius's pontificate the special links between France and the papacy, tightly woven from the middle of the eleventh century – if not indeed from as early as Pepin III and Charlemagne hundreds of years earlier – developed on a new scale.