Honorius III approves the Carmelite rule

1223

The pope approved the Rule of Saint Albert for a group of Latin hermits on Mount Carmel, descendants of early crusading pilgrims. Driven out of the Holy Land a generation later, the Carmelites would reinvent themselves as an urban mendicant order in Europe. They claimed the prophet Elijah as their spiritual founder, giving the order a lineage older than Christianity itself and a hermetic mystical tradition.