Ulrich von Hutten

Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) was a German knight, humanist, poet and satirist who became one of the most energetic promoters of the Protestant Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire. He belonged to the German Renaissance and, like Martin Luther or Conrad Celtis, is an early figure of German nationalism. His significance lies in bridging scholarly humanism and the Lutheran Reformation, first with his pen and then, disastrously, with the sword.

Born at Steckelberg Castle near Fulda, he came from an old Franconian knightly family. His father, who thought the sickly boy unfit for a knight's life, placed him as a child in the Benedictine abbey of Fulda with a view to a monastic career. He received a good education there, but disliked the cloister and fled in 1505, which earned him his father's lasting anger. What followed was a restless academic wandering through Cologne, Erfurt, Frankfurt an der Oder, Leipzig, Greifswald, Rostock, Wittenberg, Vienna, Pavia and Bologna, marked by poverty, illness and a spell as a common soldier.

His first notable work was Querelae in Lossios, a collection of grievances against the Lotze family, who had turned against him in Greifswald. His treatise on versification, Ars versificandi, later brought him some academic standing. Back in Germany by 1514, he entered the service of Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg at Mainz. There he gained fame by defending Johannes Reuchlin in the Epistolae obscurorum virorum, a satire written in deliberately bad ecclesiastical Latin that mocked the scholastic theologians who were attacking Reuchlin. Emperor Maximilian I crowned him poet laureate, though Hutten never stopped criticising the German princes for their petty quarrels.

His hostility toward the papacy deepened after his time in Italy. In 1517 he published an edition of Lorenzo Valla's treatise on the Donation of Constantine with a preface sharply critical of Rome, and from 1519 he openly sided with Luther. He wrote pamphlets in German, unusual for a humanist, to reach a wider public. His belief that reform had to be enforced by arms drew him into an uprising of knights against the archbishop of Trier in 1522 alongside Franz von Sickingen. The campaign failed, Sickingen died of his wounds, and Hutten had to flee to Switzerland. Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom he had tried to win over to the Reformation, refused to meet him in Basel. Hutten died in 1523 on the island of Ufenau in Lake Zurich, a victim of the syphilis he had contracted years earlier.

His reputation rests above all on Arminius, a Latin dialogue of 1520 that turned the Germanic chieftain into a symbol of German identity and inspired later works, including Kleist's play on the battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Hutten was, in short, a tireless polemicist who joined the humanist ideal of classical language and style to the religious and political protest of his age.