The Carmelites

Some time between 1206 and 1214 a group of Latin hermits living in a wadi on Mount Carmel above the bay from crusader Acre asked Albert, the patriarch of Jerusalem — who kept his seat at Acre — for a written way of life. What he gave them was short and severe: separate cells, silence, work, daily Mass, and constant meditation on the law of the Lord. As the crusader states contracted the hermits moved west, into England, France and Italy, where a hermit's rule made little sense in a town — so the life was adapted into a mendicant order alongside the Franciscans and Dominicans, and Innocent IV approved the revised Rule in 1247. The order kept the mountain in its name and in its self-understanding, and traced its origins, in its own later retellings, all the way back to the prophet Elijah.