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Carmelites and Crusading in the Later Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Andrew Jotischky
Andrew Jotischky*
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
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Extract

In contrast with their larger competitors, the Franciscans and Dominicans, the Carmelites seemed to eschew the Holy Land after its loss to the Mamluks in 1291. At first sight, the apparent lack of interest on the part of Carmelites in crusading and the Holy Land is surprising. Founded on Mount Carmel as an eremitical and contemplative community in the first decade of the thirteenth century, by the 1240s the Carmelites had begun to spread westward via Cyprus to England, France and Sicily, where they adapted their original Rule in order to become mendicants. In 1291 they left the Holy Land altogether, but unlike the Franciscans, who negotiated a return in the 1330s through their custody of the Holy Places, and the Dominicans, who maintained missions in Mongol and Turkish territories, the Carmelites seemed to show little interest in returning to their original homeland. Nor have they been generally associated with preaching the crusade in the systematic fashion of the larger mendicant orders. In fact, one could be excused for assuming that the order willingly lost touch with its geographical roots.

Type
Part I: The Churches’ Use of the Past
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 49: The Church on its Past , 2013 , pp. 110 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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References

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16 Saggi, Sant’Angelo, 154–61.

17 Ibid. 115.

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28 Jotischky, Carmelites and Antiquity, 136–50.

29 Ibid. 166–83; Clark, J. P. H., ‘A Defense of the Carmelite Order by John Hornby, O. Carm, AD 1374’, Carmelas 32 (1985), 73–106.Google Scholar