From a Mountain Hermitage to a European Reform

The Carmelites began as strict hermits on Mount Carmel itself, living under Albert of Jerusalem's austere early rule, but the order's entire subsequent shape was set by a single external event: the collapse of the Crusader states in the Holy Land, culminating in the fall of Acre in 1291, forced the community to relocate to Europe, where a life designed for solitary hermitages on a single mountainside had to be adapted to towns and cities instead.

Pope Innocent IV had already moved the order in that direction decades earlier, in 1247, modifying the original rule to permit a more communal, mendicant style of life better suited to European conditions than to the isolation Mount Carmel had allowed, which is why Carmelites function today as friars rather than as hermits despite their origin. The order underwent its own major reform three centuries later, when Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, both sixteenth century Spanish mystics, led a movement to restore stricter contemplative poverty and simplicity against what they saw as a relaxation of the founding austerity, a reform that produced the Discalced Carmelites as a distinct branch alongside the original, unreformed Carmelite order, repeating the same reform and counter reform pattern found across the Cistercian and Franciscan families.