payments (census) due the Holy See from seven religious houses in his lands, he declared an irregularly or simoniacally elected abbot deposed by papal authority, and he promised that he and his successors would incur a personal census of 100 gold mancuses annually in order that he might be considered a "special knight of Saint Peter" (pecularis miles sancti Petri). Despite the promises, there is no actual evidence of payment during the pontificate of Gregory VII. It is sometimes said that Bernard—following the example of Sancho Ramírez, who had done the same with the Kingdom of Aragon in 1068—surrendered his county to the Papacy and received it back as a fief.Richard W. Southern (1953), The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press), 123. The abbot of Saint-Victor de Marseille and papal legate to the council, Ricard de Milhau, and the monks of Ripoll pressed Bernard to join the abbey of Sant Joan de les Abadesses to Saint-Victor, perhaps by promising to restore Benedictine rule there. The cession was finalised on 4 January 1083. There is no contemporary record of this, however. Rather the legend dates from the 1115 house chronicle of Sant Joan. Bernard held his county directly from God. By a charter dated 26 September 1084, Bernard donated the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Besalú to the Abbey of Saint Rufus in Valence. This charter refers to a son, but Bernard was succeeded on his death by Bernard III, whose precise relationship with the previous counts of Besalú has not been discovered. Having taken the cross to join the First Crusade after the Council of Clermont (1095), Bernard was nonetheless counselled by Pope Urban II to instead remain in Spain and fight the Reconquista''. In a letter that must be dated between January 1096 and July 1099, Urban wrote to Bernard, his brother Wifred, Hugh II of Empúries, Giselbert II of Roussillon, and their followers, urging the recovery of the city of Tarragona and its vacant archdiocese. Secular politics In 1097 Bernard ceded the lordship of Olot to Ripoll. In 1099 Dalmau Berenguer, viscount of Rocabertí, ceded the allodial castle of Hortal to Bernard, who bestowed it on him as a fief. Donald Kagay translates an example of the "transfer of castle by a lord to the son of a deceased vassal" taken from the surviving charters of Bernard: This is a pact in