The Vallombrosians originated in Tuscany in 1040 as an outgrowth of the Camaldolian reform movement. St. John Gualbert, the scion of a noble Florentine family, was the founder. Sent by his father to kill the murderer of his brother, he spared his life, when he made the sign of the cross with his arms. On his return to Florence, entering the little Church of San Miniato to pray before an image of Jesus, the figure nodded its head in approval of his act of mercy. As a result in 1038 he became a monk and soon joined St. Romould. Two years later he determined to found an order of his own at Vallombrosa. Followers enough came to begin his organisation and they were put under St. Benedict's rule modified to meet his ideas. Candidates were put on a year's probation and members were divided into three classes,--the religious, the serving brethren, and the laity. When he died in 1073, seven cloisters had been established in Italy, and when the founder was made a saint in 1193 they numbered sixty. The monastery of Hirshau was established in the Black Forest of Germany.[431:2] William of Bavaria began the reformation there in 1065 by freeing the monastery from secular control, drawing up a constitution for it on reform lines, patterning its policy after the Clugniac movement, and introducing lay brethren. From Hirshau reformation spread over a large part of Germany, and these reform cloisters strongly supported the lofty programme of Gregory VII.[432:1] Peter Damiani was born in Ravenna of poor parents in 1006 and early left an orphan. As a boy he had a hard life, but was educated by a brother at Ravenna, Faenza, and Parma. Then he became a teacher and gained wealth and fame as an instructor in grammar and rhetoric at Ravenna. Suddenly at the age of twenty-nine resolving to become a monk, he entered a monastery at Fonte Avellano where he excelled the old monks in intemperate tortures, studied the Scriptures and preached, and wrote a biography of St. Romould. At the age of thirty-seven he was chosen abbot and then introduced St. Romould's Benedictine rule, which made fasting and torture a regular system. Each psalm was to be recited accompanied by one hundred lashes on the bare back and the whole psalter with one thousand five hundred lashes. This practice soon became a regular craze and was taken up later by the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Flagellants. He permitted his monks to read the Scriptures and the Fathers, encouraged them in performing hand work, but cut them off wholly from the world. He soon became the recognised leader of the reform party in Europe. He denounced his age as worse than that of Sodom and Gomorrah; demanded a reformation of monasteries, of all the clergy, and of the Church in general; dedicated his life to a crusade against simony and marriage of the clergy; and condemned in the clergy the practice of bearing arms as Leo IX. did in driving back the Normans (1053).