When at the end of 1146 Eugenius III and his advisers decided to take the road to France, there was no lack of precedent for such a journey. Setting aside the somewhat ambiguous legacy of the five popes who had travelled to Frankish lands in Carolingian times, they could look to the much more positive examples of the reform popes from the mid-eleventh century onwards. In 1049, Leo IX had interrupted what was primarily a reforming tour of northern Germany under the patronage of the Emperor Henry III, to make an important excursion to Reims. There, on 1 October, he translated the relics of St Rémi and consecrated the cathedral, following which he presided at a council where, ‘with the advice of our fellow bishops and the assent and approval of the clergy and people, an enormous number of whom had flooded in to celebrate such an important consecration’, he issued ‘many [decrees] necessary for the Christian religion’. The Frenchborn Urban II in 1095–6 and the Burgundian-born Calixtus II in 1119–20 went even further, and turned the crisis of the schisms which confronted them into opportunities to establish the legitimacy of their papacy against imperially supported rivals. Not only were they enthusiastically received by the French monarchy, nobility, and clergy, but they presided at councils which carried forward the reform programme begun by Leo and confirmed papal leadership of the Church.