A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Carmelites started their existence as an informal group of hermits living on Mount Carmel in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, probably as refugees when Jerusalem was first recaptured by the Muslims in 1187. Conditions grew impossible for them when the whole kingdom collapsed, so they migrated westwards across the Mediterranean. After they reached Europe, they accounted for their odd history to a wary Church hierarchy by the drastically ingenious means of inventing an even more exotic origin, in the time of the Prophet Elijah, a much earlier enthusiast for Mount Carmel. Thus they became the only religious order ever to claim a pre-Christian past, as well as the only order of contemplative religious to take their origins among the Latin settlements of the East.