Un fondatore frainteso: Cleto nella storia dei frati Crociferi

The Cruciferi friars arose in the social and religious context of the 12th century, a period marked by a renewed spirituality that had among its most distinctive aspects the great flowering of hospices all over Christianity. Regarding the origins of the Cruciferi, one aspect still full of questions concerns the figure of their alleged founder, a man named Cletus. This character, of whom we have no biographical data, appears in the oldest documents of the early Cruciferi, now as an ordinary man and now as a saint. This article investigates the erroneous interpretations made about Cleto's identity: initially, a 14th-century Venetian chronicler mistakenly considered him to be the benefactor of the city hospice of Santa Maria of Cruciferi; later, the order's historiographers of the 15th-17th centuries, in an effort to reconstruct the origins and driven by the need to find an illustrious founder, identified the Cletus of the sources with Pope Cletus, whose papacy is dated to the end of the 1st century AD.