Berthold was born around 1090 to a noble French Limousin family at Limoges — a kinsman of Aymeric of Limoges (the Latin Patriarch of Antioch 1140–1196). Educated at the University of Paris, he became a priest and undertook the journey to the Holy Land in support of his kinsman the Patriarch.
Around 1138 he arrived at Mount Carmel — the holy mountain on the Mediterranean coast of northern Palestine (near modern Haifa) — famous in Christian-Catholic tradition as the mountain on which the prophet Elijah had taken refuge in his hermit-cave (per 1 Kings 18–19), and as the mountain on which Elijah had challenged the prophets of Baal in the dramatic confrontation of 1 Kings 18.
From at least the late 12th century, Latin Catholic hermits and Greek-Orthodox hermits had been settling on Mount Carmel in individual hermit-cells, claiming descent from the Elijah-hermit-tradition. Berthold undertook to organize the scattered hermit-individuals on Mount Carmel into the unified eremitic-community that would subsequently become the Carmelite Order.
Around 1185 Berthold was chosen as the first organizer-superior of the unified Mount Carmel hermit-community — institutionally establishing the eremitic discipline that would underpin the Carmelite Order. The specifically Bertholdian organization placed each individual hermit-cell in proximity to the principal chapel (dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the origin of the Carmelite Order's dedication to Mary as Patroness), instituted corporate-liturgical gathering of the hermits, and established the basic ascetic-disciplinary rule.
Berthold died at Mount Carmel on March 29, 1195. His immediate successors — St. Brocard (Bertholdian successor, died c. 1231) and St. Albert of Jerusalem (the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem who composed the Rule of St. Albert for the Mount Carmel hermits between 1206 and 1214) — completed the institutional transformation of the eremitic community into the Carmelite Order proper.
The Carmelite Order — migrating west from the Holy Land after the fall of Acre in 1291 to the Carmelite foundations across Western Europe — produced the classic Catholic mystical-spiritual tradition of Sts. Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), John of the Cross (1542–1591), Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), Edith Stein (1891–1942), and the continuing Discalced Carmelite tradition to the present day.