Sveti Petar u Šumi got its name after the Benedictine monastery, which appears in historical documents from 1174 with an unclear note on its 50 years of existence. Unlike other Istrian villages and towns where a settlement was built on a hilltop with a church and its tower, with the edges of the hill dotted with houses, at Sveti Petar u Šumi there were no houses around either the church or the monastery. Its inhabitants lived a bit further away, in scattered hamlets situated next to fields and vineyards, on the edges of karst plains filled with the red soil they cultivated, just the way it is today.

Legends have it that the Hungarian King Salomon (1089) spent some time at Sveti Petar u Šumi after he had been dethroned in dynastic struggles. The monastery is also associated with the Istrian side of the Counts of Gorizia, who ruled in Pazin from the 13th to the 15th century and ordinarily helped the monastery, where they allegedly had family tombs.

From the times of the Benedictines there is only one Latin book preserved, written in Carolingian minuscule, from the end of the 11th or the beginning of the 12the century. The Fragment of Sveti Petar u Šumi, a stone found among the ruins of the monastery wall with Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabet inscribed on it, dates back to the same period and shows that all the three scripts were in use at the time.

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