Nicholas of Flüe, known as Brother Klaus (1417-1487) lived as a wealthy and respected farmer with a family of several people in Obwalden (a Swiss canton in central Switzerland). At the age of 45, he increasingly felt a calling to God within himself, which triggered a deep crisis in his life, which he was only able to overcome by completely turning his back on his family and the material values he had acquired. In 1467, he therefore set off on a pilgrimage, from which he returned as a hermit. Until his death, he lived in a small hut in the Ranft, (Flüeli-Ranft is a Swiss village in the municipality of Sachseln in the canton of Obwalden in Central Switzerland), where he spent 19 years without food and was repeatedly sought out by political rulers as a mediator in the bloody history of the early Swiss Confederation. Due to his abstinence from food and drink, he was already venerated as a saint during his lifetime, after the Church had convinced itself that his asceticism was not the work of an evil spirit.