The Order of Carmelite Friars is founded. The Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, or simply the Carmelites, appears to derive from a hermit community that arose in Palestine near the cave of the prophet Elijah on Mount Carmel (Aramaic for “garden”), where he lived in observance of the faith of the God of Israel. In the centuries following the 4th century, Christian communities of the Maronite rite presumably settled there. At the end of the 12th century, Christian pilgrims who had arrived from the West with the Third Crusade, including the nobleman Bertoldo, joined the monastery and built a church consecrated to the Virgin. At the beginning of the 13th century, Pope Honorius III approved the Order (1226) with the papal bull Ut vivendi normam, with the first statute, primitive rule or formula vitae, most likely drawn up by Alberto da Vercelli (1150-1214), Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem (with seat in St. John of Acre), which prescribed night vigils, rigorous fasting and abstinence, and the practice of poverty and silence. In 1235, due to the Saracen raids, the friars abandoned the East to settle initially in Messina (Ritiro) and then, with the foundation of various convents, spread, under the guidance of the prior Simone Stock (1165-1265), to the main university seats of Europe. Pope Innocent IV confirmed (1247) the rule of the Carmelite friars (Quae honorem conditoris omnium) by attenuating their hermitic practice and making them an order of mendicants who aimed to spread the Marian cult.
