Ulrich Von Hutten

HUTTEN, ULRICH VON (1488-1523), German humanist and soldier, was born on April 21, 1488, at the castle of Steckel berg, near Fulda, in Hesse. His life may be divided into four parts :—his youth and cloister-life (1488-1504) ; his wanderings in pursuit of knowledge (1504-1515) ; his strife with Ulrich of Wurttemberg ; and his connection with the Reforma tion (1519-1523). He was the eldest son of a poor but not undis tinguished knightly family.

Wanderings.

As he was mean of stature and sickly his father sent him to the Benedictine house at Fulda; the thirst for learning there seized on him, and in 1505 he fled from the monastic life. He went first to Cologne, next to Erfurt, and then to Frankfort-on Oder on the opening in 1506 of the new university of that town. For a time he was in Leipzig, and in 1508 we find him a ship wrecked beggar on the Pomeranian coast. In 1509 the university of Greifswald welcomed him, but the sensitive ill-regulated youth, who took the liberties of genius, wearied his burgher patrons. He left Greifswald and was robbed of clothes and books, his only baggage, by the servants of his late friends; in the dead of winter, half starved, frozen, penniless, he reached Rostock.

Here under the protection of the Humanists he wrote against his Greifswald patrons, thus beginning the long list of his satires and fierce attacks on personal or public foes. From Rostock he wandered on to Wittenberg and Leipzig, to Vienna and on to Pavia, where he spent the year 1511 and part of 1512. In the siege of Pavia (1512) by papal troops and Swiss, he was plundered by both sides, and escaped, sick and penniless, to Bologna; on his recovery he took service as a private soldier in the emperor's army.

In 1514 he was again in Germany, under the patronage of the elector of Mainz, Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg. But the murder in 1515 of his relative Hans von Hutten by Ulrich, duke of Wurttemberg, changed the whole course of his life ; satire, chief refuge of the weak, became Hutten's weapon ; with one hand he took his part in the famous Epistolae obscurorum virorum and with the other launched scathing letters, eloquent Ciceronian ora tions, or biting satires against the duke. The emperor took Hutten under his protection and gave him a laureate crown in 1517. The poet, who had meanwhile revisited Italy, again attached himself to the electoral court at Mainz. In 1518 his friend Pirckheimer urged him to abandon the court and dedicate himself to letters, but he insisted on his mission as a knight of the empire.

The Knightly Satirist.

In 1519 he issued in one volume his five attacks on Duke Ulrich, and then took part in the private war against him; in this affair he became intimate with Franz von Sickingen, the champion of the knightly order (Ritterstand). Hutten now espoused the Lutheran cause, but he was at the same time mixed up in the attempt of the "Ritterstand" to assert itself as the militia of the empire against the independence of the German princes. Soon after this time he discovered at Fulda a copy of the manifesto of the emperor Henry IV. against Hilde brand, and published it with comments as an attack on the papal claims over Germany. He hoped thereby to interest the new emperor Charles V., and the higher orders in the empire, in behalf of German liberties; but the appeal failed. Luther had succeeded by speaking to cities and common folk in homely phrase, because he touched heart and conscience ; Hutten tried to touch the more cultivated sympathies and dormant patriotism of princes and bishops, nobles and knights. And so he at once gained an undying name in the republic of letters and ruined his own career. He showed that the artificial verse-making of the Humanists could be connected with the new outburst of genuine German poetry. The Minnesinger was gone ; the new national singer, a Luther or a Hans Sachs, was heralded by the stirring lines of Hutten's pen. These have in them a splendid natural swing and ring, strong and patriotic.

The attack on the papacy, and Luther's vast and sudden popu larity, frightened Elector Albert, who dismissed Hutten from his court. Hoping for imperial favour, he betook himself to Charles V., but was rebuffed. He now attached himself more closely to Franz von Sickingen. He fled to Basel, where Erasmus refused to see him, both for fear of his loathsome diseases, and also because the beggared knight was sure to borrow money from him. A paper war consequently broke out between the two Humanists, which embittered Hutten's last days, and stained the memory of Eras mus. From Basel Ulrich went to Mulhausen; and then to Zurich. There Zwingli helped him with money, and found him a refuge on the little isle of Ufnau on the Zurich lake. There the frail and worn-out poet, writing swift satire to the end, died on Aug. 29, 1523 at the age of thirty-five. He left behind him some debts due to compassionate friends ; he did not even own a single book, and all his goods amounted to the clothes on his back, a bundle of letters, and that valiant pen which had fought so many a sharp battle, and had won for the poor knight-errant a sure place in the annals of literature.

Ulrich von Hutten is one of those men of genius at whom propriety is shocked, and whom the mean-spirited avoid. Yet through his short and buffeted life he was befriended, with wonder ful charity and patience, by the chief leaders of the Humanist movement. For, in spite of his irritable vanity, his immoral life and habits, his odious diseases, his painful restlessness, Hutten had much in him that strong men could admire, for he passionately loved truth for its own sake. His patriotism is beyond dispute, though the cause with which he associated himself was particular ist and doomed to failure. There was no salvation for Germany in the Ritterstand. It is as humanist and poet, and for his frank and noble nature that his claims to honour lie. A swarm of writings issued from his pen ; at first the smooth elegance of his Latin prose and verse seemed strangely to miss his real character; he was the Cicero and Ovid of Germany before he became its Lucian.

His chief works were his Ars versificandi (15 11 ) ; the Nemo (1518) ; a work on the Morbus Gallicus (I 519) ; the volume of Steckelberg complaints against Duke Ulrich (including his four Ciceronian Orations, his Letters and the Phalarismus) also in I 519 ; the Vadismus ( I 5 20) ; and the controversy with Erasmus at the end of his life. Besides these were many admirable poems in Latin and German. He was one of the most distinguished con tributors to, though not the originator of the Epistolae obscurorum virorum, that famous satire on the theologians of Cologne with which the friends of Reuchlin defended him. In 1909 the Latin text of the Epistolae with an English translation was published by F. G. Stokes. D. F. Strauss concludes that he had no share in the first part, but that his hand is clearly visible in the second part, which he attributes in the main to him. To him is due the more serious and severe tone of that bitter portion of the satire. See W. Brecht, Die V er f asser der Epistolae obscurorum virorum BIBLIOGRAPHY -For a complete catalogue of the writings of Hutten, Bibliography-For a complete catalogue of the writings of Hutten, see E. Backing's Index Bibliographicus Huttenianus (1858). Backing is also the editor of the complete edition of Hutten's works (7 vols., 1859-62) . A selection of Hutten's German writings, edited by G. Balke, appeared in 1891. The best biography (though it is also some what of a political pamphlet) is that of D. F. Strauss (Ulrich von Hutten, 1857; new ed. by O. Clemen, 1914; English translation by G. Sturge, 1874), with which may be compared the P. Kalkoff's Ulrich von Hutten and die Reformation (1920) and Huttens, Vaganten zeit and Untergang (1925), in which a less favourable view of Hutten's political and religious activity is taken.