Joachim was born around 1135 in Celico, a hill town in Calabria then part of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, the son of a notary. As a young man he entered royal administrative service before a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where by his own later account he experienced a period of illumination that turned him toward religious life. On returning to Calabria he lived for a time as a hermit and preacher on Mount Etna before entering the Cistercian monastery of Sambucina and then the abbey of Corazzo, where the monks elected him abbot around 1177.
As abbot, Joachim found the discipline of running an indebted, poorly endowed house left him little time for the biblical study he considered his true calling. He travelled to Rome and won papal permission, first from Lucius III and then confirmed by Urban III and Clement III, to withdraw from administrative duties and devote himself to writing. Corazzo was incorporated into the Cistercian order to secure its future, and Joachim moved deeper into the Calabrian mountains, gathering companions at San Giovanni in Fiore.
There, in the 1190s, he founded a stricter monastic congregation, the Florensian Order, formally approved by Celestine III in 1196. He spent his final years at Fiore composing his major works, the Liber de Concordia, the Expositio in Apocalypsim and the Psalterium Decem Chordarum, while advising secular and religious rulers who sought his prophetic reputation, including, according to later chroniclers, King Richard the Lionheart on his way to the Third Crusade. Joachim died at Fiore in 1202, and his order continued under its own rule until it merged with the Cistercians in 1570.