[Illustration: Fig. 20.--ULRICH VON HUTTEN. (From an old woodcut.)]
Here these Humanist friends of the Lutheran movement had already been joined by Crotus' personal friend, Ulrich von Hutten, who not only could wield his pen with more vigour and acuteness than almost all his associates, but who declared himself ready to take up the sword for the cause he defended, and to call in powerful allies of his own class to the fight. He sprang from an old Franconian family, the heirs, not indeed of much wealth or property, but of an old knightly spirit of independence. Hatred of monasticism and all that belonged to it, must have been nursed by him from youth; for having been placed, when a boy, in a convent, he ran away with the aid of Crotus, when only sixteen. Sharing the literary tastes of his friend, he learned to write with proficiency the poetical and rhetorical Latin of the Humanists of that time. In spite of all his irregularities, adventures, and unsettlement of habits, he had preserved an elastic and elevated turn of mind, desirous of serving the interests of a 'free and noble learning,' and a knightly courage, which urged him to the fight with a frankness and straightforwardness not often found among his fellow-Humanists. Whilst laughing at Luther's controversy as a petty monkish quarrel, he himself dealt a heavy blow to the traditional pretensions of the Papacy by the republication of a work by the famous Italian Humanist Laurentius Valla, long since dead, on the pretended donation of Constantine, in which the writer exposed the forgery of the edict purporting to grant the possession of Rome, Italy, and indeed the entire Western world to the Roman see. This work Hutten actually dedicated to Pope Leo himself. But what distinguished this knight and Humanist above all the others who were contending on behalf of learning and against the oppressions and usurpations of the Church and monasticism, were his thoroughly German sympathies, and his zeal for the honour and independence of his nation. He saw her enslaved in ecclesiastical bondage to the Papal see, and at the mercy of the avarice and caprice of Rome. He heard with indignation how scornfully the 'rough and simple Germans' were spoken of in Italy, how even on German soil the Roman emissaries openly paraded their arrogance, how some Germans, unworthy of the name, pandered to such scorn and contempt by a cringing servility which made them crouch before the Papal chair and sue for favour and office. He warned them to prepare for a mighty outburst of German liberty, already well-nigh strangled by Rome. At the same time he denounced the vices of his own countrymen, particularly that of drunkenness, and the proneness to luxury and usurious dealing in trade and commerce, all of which, as we have seen, had been complained of by Luther. Nor less than of the honour of Germany herself, was he jealous of the honour and power of the Empire. In all that he did he was guided, perhaps involuntarily, but in a special degree, by the principles and interests of knighthood. His order was indebted to the Empire for its chief support, although the imperial authority no less than that of his own class, had sunk in a great measure through the increasing power of the different princes. In the prosperous middle class of Germany he saw the spirit of trade prevailing to an excess, with its attendant evils. In the firmly-settled regulations of law and order, which had been established in Germany with great trouble at the end of the middle ages, he felt most out of his element: he longed rather to resort to the old method of force whenever he saw justice trampled on. And in this respect also Hutten proved true to the traditions of knighthood.