Ulrich von Hutten, the knight whose satire helped clear a path for Luther
A sickly boy sent to a monastery at ten, Ulrich von Hutten fled at seventeen and spent his life wandering, feuding and writing. He mocked scholastic theologians in fake letters, attacked the papacy in print, led knights against an archbishop, and wrote one of medicine's earliest patient accounts of his own syphilis.
Hutten was born on 21 April 1488 at Steckelberg Castle in Hesse, the eldest son of a poor knightly family. Because he was small and frail, his father placed him with the Benedictines at Fulda, where he received a fine education but chafed at cloister rules. In 1505 he ran off to Cologne, winning freedom at the cost of his father's lasting anger. Years of roaming followed: universities at Frankfurt an der Oder, Leipzig, Greifswald and Wittenberg, then law at Pavia, where in 1512 besieging armies plundered him from both sides.
A turning point came in 1515, when Duke Ulrich of Württemberg murdered his relative Hans von Hutten. From then on satire was his weapon. He fired orations and letters at the duke and joined in the Letters of Obscure Men, a set of invented epistles ridiculing theologians who opposed his mentor Johannes Reuchlin's fight to save Hebrew books from confiscation. Scholars now credit him with most of its second part.
In Italy he developed a fierce hostility to the papacy, voiced in his 1517 preface to Lorenzo Valla's exposure of the Donation of Constantine. That year the emperor crowned him poet laureate and knighted him. By 1519 he backed Luther, but unlike Luther he sought reform by force. With Franz von Sickingen he attacked the Archbishop of Trier's lands in 1522; the knights' defeat in 1523 ended them as a political power. Erasmus, whom he tried to recruit, refused to see him.
Hutten lived with syphilis for his last 15 years, and his 1519 treatise on the disease and its treatment with guaiacum ranks among the first patient narratives. He died in seclusion on the island of Ufenau in Lake Zurich on 29 August 1523, having published some 45 works. His Arminius dialogue later fed German nationalism, and Stanford's motto, Die Luft der Freiheit weht, traces back to him.
Source: Ulrich von Hutten
