Part One - The Carmelites

Summary

The Carmelites are best known as one of the mendicant orders which rose to prominence in the thirteenth century. By the 1290s contemporaries listed them alongside the Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians as one of the orders of friars whose mission lay in the urban world of the Latin West. Yet their origins were far removed from Europe. They took their name not from a charismatic leader, as did the followers of Francis or Dominic, but from Mount Carmel, a holy site overlooking the Mediterranean coast in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, next to Haifa in modern Israel. From the fourth century, it had been identified as the mountain from which the prophet Elijah brought down fire on the men of King Ahaziah (II Kings 1). Defined by their attachment to this holy place, the first Carmelites were not itinerant like the friars, but instead were hermits pursuing lives of solitary contemplation. They never entirely forgot their eremitical roots, yet within decades of the approval of their first community, they were living in houses on the fringes of the great cities of the Latin West, preaching and sharing in the pastoral care of lay women and men. It was a transition which requires explanation.