Jalal al-Din Rumi taught in Konya, the Seljuk capital in central Anatolia, across the middle decades of the thirteenth century, drawing students with a body of poetry, above all the six-volume Masnavi, that ranks among the most widely read works of mystical literature in any language. Rumi did not organize a formal order in his own lifetime; what existed around him was a circle of students and companions gathered by his teaching and by his close, transformative friendship with the wandering dervish Shams-e Tabrizi, whose disappearance is said to have deepened Rumi's own poetry immeasurably. When Rumi died in 1273, his funeral in Konya reportedly drew mourners from across the city's religious communities, Muslim, Christian and Jewish alike, a detail later tradition took as proof of the breadth of his following.
It fell to Rumi's son and successor, Sultan Walad, to turn that following into an institution.
Sultan Walad gathered Rumi's circle into a structured order, built its practice around the tomb his father was buried beneath in Konya, later covered by the distinctive Green Dome, and gave the group the name by which it has been known since, Mevlevi, from Mevlana, Our Master, Rumi's own honorific title among his students. Leadership of the order subsequently passed down a hereditary line descended from Sultan Walad himself, an unusual pattern among Sufi orders, most of which transmit authority by spiritual designation between master and disciple rather than by descent within a single family.