 This makes his ecclesiastical career, starting as an oblate, coherent with the normal career of a secular child, who would have entered into a squireship at around the same age he seems to have entered the Church in Liège, putatively around 1196.In 1199 however he entered the Cistercian monastery of Villers in Brabant, whose abbot was another uncle.He soon became prior, and in 1209 abbot.