When Michael and I had become young men and played our part in torchlit dances and bearded masques, our neighbour's little girl slipped through the green hedge and came shyly and yet deliberately to the bower where we first sat with our teacher Theodoros Antoniades, exiled from Chios, whose evil star had led him, to prove a real blessing to me, to Nuremberg. In his flight from the Turks he had only been able to take with him a few rolled-up parchments and books he had written himself and his language, which was like a revelation to me and fell on my soul like a rainbow. I helped the homeless refugee to live and he taught me his Greek tongue and tried to teach it to my friend and would perhaps have managed it if the child had not stuck her curly little head into the green bower. Master Theodoros was just drawing his first gamma on the table with a piece of chalk when the child appeared and Greek went out of the window for the wild child Michael Groland von Laufenholz. He caught up the child with a laugh, lifted her, made much of her and disrupted the lesson in no uncertain way. I told him off severely, but he laughed all the more and the girl got no further than the alphabet. But his fate was decided thereby and so was mine.
The little girl came to every lesson that we held in the garden and, though Michael did not continue to annoy us any further, he seated his little friend on his knee and she, Mechthild, learnt more from Master Theodoros Antoniades than Michael did, for she listened attentively and quietly enough to him and watched with big, earnest eyes the careworn face of the wise, banished teacher. After the lesson she ran more or less wild admittedly and she and Michael Groland chased each other through the garden round bushes and trees so that all the neighbours stuck their heads out of their windows and women and young women working for the owner of the House of the Golden Shield leaned on their garden fence in happy astonishment and witnessed smiling the game between the young child and the grown-up one. Even the ancient landlady, the owner's old mother in the House of the Shield, who was newly married when the Emperor and his Empire's representatives had held council in the presence of the Golden Seal, who had knelt before the house's altar next to the Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, even she came, supported by her staff and her granddaughter's arm, to the fence and took pleasure in the pleasure evinced by the two youngsters.
Tolle! Lege! This old mother, Anna Grundherrin, on whom such a great honour was bestowed by Emperor and Empire, took upon herself an even greater honour after in the cause of mercy and humility. She was the first Mater Leprosorum, the first patroness of the lepers, Usslingerin's first helper, and as I am writing not of the Emperor or the Empire, but of myself and my own family, no more need be said of the Golden Seal, but a lot about the lepers, and truly I have a sad right to, as will be recognized after I have put this quill down tonight.
In the year of Our Lord's Grace 1394 the hearts of Christians first turned to lepers hereabouts. At that time there was a pious preacher in the town, Master Nicholas at the Holy Spirit Hospice. He it was who first succeeded, with God's help, in waking the hearts of the people in Nuremberg. He began in his church to preach sermons for the lepers and made a loud appeal for charitable actions to alleviate this great, inexpressible misery and appealed above all to kindly women, stirred their hearts and they responded to his call.
The first three devout women to turn up were: the Usslingerin, then Anna Grundherrin from the Golden Seal and then Anna Weidingin. They started by feeding the lepers, for three days in Holy Week to begin with—Wednesday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. And others followed their example and then others and a shining work of charity came out of it. Then more than two thousand lost ones came to the churchyard of Saint Sebaldus where the fiery friar Johannes Capistranus is now holding forth and sat down in an orderly fashion at table and a foundation was enthusiastically founded then for all time, the Leprosy Foundation, and tasks were assigned as by right and because they were cheap to be carried out by women. The eldest woman was named the Mother of the Sick.
Everything sprang up in a wave of enthusiasm! And although in the breasts of women a slight flame remained, the interest of the council soon waned in light and heat and finally went out in the year 1401. Then there arose because of overcrowding a decree whereby lepers should no more be allowed into the town, that the healthy should be protected from them, and the Lord Himself must intervene from heaven so that the good works and words of Master Nicholas of the Holy Spirit Hospice should not cause even greater grief than they already had.
The Lord acted speedily and sharply and sent sickness to the town without the lepers being there and sent plagues that had never happened before in human memory. Sick people ran through the streets like the mad, for the scourge robbed them of sense and reason and there was no distinction between rich and poor, high-born and low-born and sane and insane.
The Lord in heaven acted sharply and once again in churches sermons were preached on behalf of the lepers, and every pulpit orator reproached his now penitent congregation with what he described as God's punishment for cruelty to those who could not help themselves. It was therefore soon public as well as personal opinion that it should be decided and openly proclaimed that the lepers be released from their hovels outside the walls and again be allowed to beg for alms inside the town. Mistress Anna Grundherrin replaced the Usslingerin now as the Mother of the Sick.
Mistress Anna did not watch much longer the game between Mechthild and Michael. She departed this life and received a state funeral. Our children's games also hastened to their end. The time came for both me and Michael von Laufenholz to be packed off to university in Prague and we remained there of our own volition, each in his own way, right up until 1409.
Now everybody knows what happened in that year, how the quarrel between Realists and Nominalists was finally decided, how King Wenceslas approved the use of German as a medium of instruction at the new university of Prague founded by the Emperor Charles the Fourth and how we left it, along with five thousand foreign teachers and students and broke with the cream of the cream of that famous school. But what was in deadly earnest for some of us was for others an enjoyable game and to these, who laughed the thing off, belonged my good roommate Michael and a great deal of ink could be spilled in describing all the things he got up to on the great procession from Prague to Leipzig. So that nothing should be lacking to the new university that graced the old one, Squire Michael Groland von Laufenholz came with us to Leipzig and Margrave Friedrich the Serious had to welcome him along with the others and could like it or lump it as he chose.