Mendicant order of the Roman Catholic church.
It originated с 1155 on Mount Carmel in Palestine, where a number of former pilgrims and crusaders began to live as hermits. Their rule was written by St. Albert, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, and approved by Pope Honorius III in 1226. As Muslim incursions made Palestine increasingly unsafe, the Carmelites scattered to Cyprus, Sicily, France, and England. In England and Western Europe the order transformed itself from a group of hermits into one of mendicant friars. The first institution of Carmelite nuns was founded in 1452. St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross reemphasized the strictness and austerity of Carmelite traditions, establishing Discalced (barefoot) Carmelite orders in 1562 and 1569, which gave rise to an independent order in 1593. Both the reformed and the original orders suffered greatly during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, but they were later restored in most of Western Europe as well as in the Middle East, Latin America, and the U.S.