[2] The movement grew out of the preaching and teaching of Meister Eckhart, and especially his Dominican spiritual heirs, the preacher John Tauler and the writer Henry Suso.
An influence on the Friends of God, although remaining in the background, was the secular priest Henry of Nördlingen,[4] from the Bavarian Oberland, who met Tauler and Suso in Basel in 1339.
Henry had a great deal of interaction with other Bavarian and German mystics[5] and introduced the Friends of God to The Flowing Light of the Deity by Mechthild of Magdeburg.
The group achieved a nascent institutional form in 1367 when wealthy layman Rulman Merswin purchased and restored a derelict monastery in Strasbourg known as the grünenwörth ('Green Isle').
[8] The Friends of God, as led by Tauler and Suso, sought a mystical path in line with established Catholic doctrine, following Thomas Aquinas.