 The Benedictine monastic tradition began with St Benedict of Nursia himself, who was a Christian monk in the 6th century.Influenced by the writings of Saints Basil the Great and John Cassian, he composed a monastic rule for the ordering of the life of monastic communities in Europe, rather than adopting one of the many rules that had been composed for monks in a different climate, with different foods available, and so forth.The liturgical traditions he enumerated conformed to the Roman Rite of the local church; which was then neither as elaborate nor as legislated as it later became.