Fleeing the advancing Mongol armies from Central Asia, his family crossed Persia and Arabia over several years and eventually settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, where the Seljuk court gave his father a teaching post.

In Konya in 1244 he met Shams-e Tabrizi, a wandering dervish. Their friendship consumed him so completely that he stopped teaching law and began composing poetry, saying later that Shams had shown him a mirror of his own hidden self.

Shams disappeared from Konya, never explained, around 1247 or 1248. Rumi searched for him for years and never found him — the grief of that loss, tradition holds, is what turned into decades of poetry.

From around 1258, at the request of his disciple Husam al-Din, he began dictating a long teaching poem, the Masnavi — some 25,000 couplets, still unfinished when he died, meant as instruction for one student and read since by millions.

He died in Konya on 17 December 1273. Followers still mark the date as Şeb-i Arus, the wedding night, calling it his union with the divine rather than his death. His son founded the whirling Mevlevi order soon after.