Ulrich von Hutten

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) was an outspoken critic of the Roman Catholic Church and adherent of the Lutheran Reformation. Von Hutten studied theology at the University of Greifswald. He was leader of the Imperial Knights of the Holy Roman Empire and a great Humanist thinker.

In 1519, von Hutten became a supporter of Martin Luther and his calls for religious reform. Unlike Martin Luther, von 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. 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 Holy Roman Empire.

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

For the final 15 years of his life, von Hutten was suffering from syphilis of which he died in seclusion on the isle Ufenau on Lake Zurich. He authored 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.

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

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

[edit] References

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