Bruno of Cologne
Approx. 1030 AD — October 6, 1101 AD
Bruno of Cologne abandoned a brilliant academic career — chancellor of the Archdiocese of Reims and teacher of a future pope — to found the Carthusian Order in a remote Alpine gorge in 1084. When his former student became Pope Urban II and summoned him to Rome, Bruno refused all honors, dying in a Calabrian hermitage in 1101 with the silence he had chosen over every offered bishopric.