“The Universities, Erfurt, Leipzig and the others stand deserted,” Luther himself says as early as 1530, gazing from the Coburg at the ruins, “and likewise here and there even the boys’ schools, so that it is piteous to see them, and poor Wittenberg is now doing better than any of them. The foundations and the monasteries, in my opinion, are probably also feeling the pinch.”[91] He speaks at the same time of the decline of the Grammar schools and the lower-grade schools which also to some extent shared the fate of the Universities. In the Catholic parts of Germany the clergy schools and monastic schools suffered severely under the general calamity, as Luther had shrewdly guessed. Nor was the set-back confined to the Universities, but even the elementary schools suffered. It was practically the universal complaint of the monasteries, so Wolfgang Mayer, the learned Cistercian Abbot of Alderspach in Bavaria, wrote in 1529, that they were unable to continue for lack of postulants; “in consequence of the Lutheran controversy the schools everywhere are standing empty and no one is willing any longer to devote himself to study. The clerical and likewise the religious state is despised by all and no one is inclined to offer himself for this life.” “Oh, God who could ever have anticipated the coming of such a time! Everything is ruined, everything is in confusion, and there is nothing but sunderings, splits and heresies everywhere!” Yet these words come from the same author, who, in 1518, in the introduction to his Annals of Alderspach, had been so enthusiastic about the state of learning in Germany and had said: “Germany is richly blessed with the gifts of Minerva and disputes the palm in the literary arena with the Italians and the Greeks.” Whereas, between the years 1460-1514 no less than eighty brethren had entered Alderspach, Mayer, in his thirty years of office as Abbot, clothed only seventeen novices with the habit of St. Bernard, and, of these, five broke their vows and left the monastery. He expresses his fear that soon his religious house will be empty and ascribes the lack of novices largely to the fate which had overtaken the schools owing to the innovations.[92] “Throughout the whole of the German lands,” as Luther himself admits: “No one will any longer allow his children to learn or to study.”[93] At the same time contemporaries bitterly bewailed the wildness of the students who still remained at the Universities. With regard to Wittenberg itself we have grievous complaints on this score from both Luther and Melanchthon.[94]