ABSTRACT
In the twelfth century, the Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore wrote of the events that would mark the coming of a new age. One was the emergence of a religious order: ‘an order appears which seems to be new, but it is not. dressed in black and with a belt at the waist, they grow and their fame will spread. And they will preach the faith which they defend to the ending of the world in the spirit of Elijah. This will be the order of the hermits emulating the life of angels’.1 In 1256, a new mendicant order was created, the Order of Hermits of St Augustine, bringing many disparate hermit communities in Italy under a single rule. The event was called the great union, and the brothers took as their habit black robes with leather belts. By the 1330s, members of their order were arguing that Joachim of Fiore had foreseen the Augustinian hermits, and that the order had therefore been preordained as part of god’s plan for the Second Coming. The claim would persist into the seventeenth century.
