Ulrich von Hutten

Ulrich von Hutten (by Erhard Schön, ca. 1522)

Ulrich von Hutten (April 21 1488-August 29 1523), was an outspoken German critic of the Roman Catholic Church and adherent of the Lutheran Reformation.

Hutten was born in Burg Steckelberg, near Schlüchtern, Hesse. He studied theology at the University of Greifswald. He was a leader of the Imperial Knights of the Holy Roman Empire and a great Humanist thinker.

Hutten is well known as one of the contributors to The Letters of Obscure men. This book was written in support of Hutten's mentor, the prominent humanist Johannes Reuchlin, who was engaged in a struggle to prevent the confiscation of Hebrew texts. The Letters containted a series of fictitious letters addressed to Hardwin von Grätz, which sarcastically attacked the scholastic theologians who were acting against Reuchlin.

In 1519, Hutten became a supporter of Martin Luther and his calls for religious reform. Unlike Luther, Hutten tried to enforce reformation by military means when he, along with Franz von Sickingen attempted to begin popular crusade within the Holy Roman Empire against the power of the Roman Catholic Church in favour of Luther's reformed religion. In what is known as the Knights' Revolt, they attacked the lands of the Archbishop of Trier in 1522. However the archbishop held out and the knights were eventually defeated in 1523, destroying them as a significant political force within the empire.

Following his defeat, Hutten tried to convince Erasmus of Rotterdam to side with the Reformation. Erasmus refused to take sides, and he also refused to see Hutten when the latter came to Basel in 1523, ill and impoverished, to see him.

For the final 15 years of his life, Hutten suffered from syphilis, of which he died in seclusion on the isle Ufenau on Lake Zurich. He wrote a text in 1519, De morbo gallico [On the French disease] about the treatment of syphilis, which is now regarded as one of the first patient narratives in the history of medicine.

Hutten's refuge in Ufenau and his death are the subject of a poem by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Huttens letzte Tage.

A line from the third of Hutten's three essays collectively entitled 'Invectives', videtis illam spirare libertatis auram, was the inspiration for the motto of Stanford University, Die Luft der Freiheit weht.

References

• Die Luft der Freiheit weht - History of Stanford University's motto, mentioning its origins in a speech about Hutten.