1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hutten, Ulrich von

From Wikisource
Jump to: navigation, search
[ 14 ]

HUTTEN, ULRICH VON (1488-1523), was born on the 21st of April 1488, at the castle of Steckelberg, near Fulda, in Hesse. Like Erasmus or Pirckheimer, he was one of those men who form the bridge between Humanists and Reformers. He lived with both, sympathized with both, though he died before the Reformation had time fully to develop. 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 Württemberg (1515-1519); and his connexion with the Reformation (1510-1523). Each of these periods had its own special antagonism, which coloured Hutten's career: in the first, his horror of dull monastic routine; in the second, the ill-treatment he met with at Greifswald; in the third, the crime of Duke Ulrich; in the fourth, his disgust with Rome and with Erasmus. He was the eldest son of a poor and not undistinguished knightly family. As he was mean of stature and sickly his father destined him for the cloister, and he was sent to the Benedictine house at Fulda; the thirst for learning there seized on him, and in 1505 he fled from the monastic life, and won his freedom with the sacrifice of his worldly prospects, and at the cost of incurring his father's undying anger. From the Fulda cloister 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 shipwrecked beggar on the Pomeranian coast. In 1509 the university of Greifswald welcomed him, but here too those who at first received him kindly became his foes; the sensitive ill-regulated youth, who took the liberties of genius, wearied his burgher patrons; they could not brook the poet's airs and vanity, and ill-timed assertions of his higher rank. Wherefore he left Greifswald, and as he went 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 again the Humanists received him gladly, and under their protection he wrote against his Greifswald patrons, thus beginning the long list of his satires and fierce attacks on personal or public foes. Rostock could not hold him long; he wandered on to Wittenberg and Leipzig, and thence to Vienna, where he hoped to win the emperor Maximilian's favour by an elaborate national poem on the war with Venice. But neither Maximilian nor the university of Vienna would lift a hand for him, and he passed into Italy, where, at Pavia, he sojourned throughout 1511 and part of 1512. In the latter year his studies were interrupted by war; in the siege of Pavia by papal troops and Swiss, he was plundered by both sides, and escaped, sick and penniless, to Bologna; on his recovery he even took service as a private soldier in the emperor's army.



The poet's high dream of a knightly national regeneration had a rude awakening. The attack on the papacy, and Luther's vast and sudden popularity, frightened Elector Albert, who dismissed Hutten from his court. Hoping for imperial favour, he betook himself to Charles V.; but that young prince would have none of him. So he returned to his friends, and they rejoiced greatly to see him still alive; for Pope Leo X. had ordered him to be arrested and sent to Rome, and assassins dogged his steps. He now attached himself more closely to Franz von Sickingen and the knightly movement. This also came to a disastrous end in the capture of the Ebernberg, and Sickingen's death; the higher nobles had triumphed; the archbishops avenged themselves on Lutheranism as interpreted [ 15 ] by the knightly order. With Sickingen Hutten also finally fell. 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 Erasmus. From Basel Ulrich dragged himself to Mülhausen; and when the vengeance of Erasmus drove him thence, he went to Zurich. There the large heart of Zwingli welcomed him; he helped him with money, and found him a quiet refuge with the pastor of the little isle of Ufnau on the Zurich lake. There the frail and worn-out poet, writing swift satire to the end, died at the end of August or beginning of September 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.



For a complete catalogue of the writings of Hutten, see E. Böcking's Index Bibliographicus Huttenianus (1858). Böcking is also the editor of the complete edition of Hutten's works (7 vols., 1859-1862). A selection of Hutten's German writings, edited by G. Balke, appeared in 1891. Cp. S. Szamatolski, Huttens deutsche Schriften (1891). The best biography (though it is also somewhat of a political pamphlet) is that of D. F. Strauss (Ulrich von Hutten, 1857; 4th ed., 1878; English translation by G. Sturge, 1874), with which may be compared the older monographs by A. Wagenseil (1823), A. Bürck (1846) and J. Zeller (Paris, 1849). See also J. Deckert, Ulrich von Huttens Leben und Wirken. Eine historische Skizze (1901).

(G. W. K.)