The Benedictines had consecrated themselves to the service of Mary since the time of the Crusades, and, beginning with the eleventh century, many religious orders and brotherhoods were organized in honor of Mary. The Order of the Knights of the Star was founded in 1022, and the Knights of the Lily were organized in 1048. About the middle of the twelfth century the Order of the Holy Maid of Evora and that of the Knights of Alcantara were established, and others followed. In 1149 Pope Celestine III. chartered the Order of the Holy Virgin, for the service of a hospital in Siena; in 1218, after a revelation from on high, the Order of the Holy Mary of Mercy was founded by Peter Nolascus--Raymond von Pennaforte--for the express purpose of giving aid and freedom to captives. In 1233 seven noble Florentines founded the Order of the Servants of Mercy, adopting Saint Augustine's rules of conduct, and they dwelt in the convent of the Annunziata, in Florence. In 1285 Philip Benizio founded a similar order for women, and, soon after, the pious Juliana Falconeri instituted for women a second order of the same kind. There was a constant multiplication of these orders vowed to the service of the Madonna as the centuries passed, and the idea of Madonna worship became more firmly fixed. No account of Madonna worship can be considered complete, however, without some reference to the influence which it exerted upon the art of the time. Madonna pictures first appeared in the East, where the worship of such images had gained a firm foothold as early as the ninth century, but long before that time pictures of the Mother of God were known and many of them had become quite famous. Saint Luke the Evangelist is generally considered as the first of the religious painters, and the Vladimir Church at Moscow is in possession of a Madonna which is supposed to be the work of his hand. The Eastern Church was the first to feel the effect of this outburst of religious art, and it is but natural to find some of its earliest examples in various other Russian cities, such as Kieff, Kazan, and Novgorod. Bronze reliefs of the Virgin were also common, and in many a crude form and fashion this newly aroused sentiment of Christian art sought to find adequate expression. The Western Church soon followed this movement in every detail, and then by slow degrees upon Italian soil began that evolution in artistic conception and artistic technique which was to culminate in the effulgent glory of Raphael's Sistine Madonna. It was the Emperor Justinian's conquest of Italy which "sowed the new art seed in a fertile field," to use Miss Hurl's expression; but inasmuch as artistic endeavor shows that same lack of originality which was characteristic of all other forms of intellectual activity at this time, the germ took root but slowly, and for a number of centuries servile imitations of the highly decorated and decidedly soulless Byzantine Virgins were very common.