page_title: Ulrich von Hutten
section_title: Pursuit of knowledge
hierarchical_section_title: Ulrich von Hutten / Biography / Pursuit of knowledge
caption_attribution_description: English: Plaque to Ulrich von Hutten, Schlossstrasse, Wittenberg
context_page_description: Ulrich von Hutten was a German knight, scholar, poet and satirist, who later became a follower of Martin Luther and a Protestant reformer.
  By 1519, he was an outspoken critic of the Roman Catholic Church. Hutten was a bridge between the Renaissance humanists and the Lutheran Reformation.
  He was a leader of the Imperial Knights of the Holy Roman Empire along with Franz von Sickingen. Both were the leaders in the Knights' Revolt.
context_section_description: In Cologne, Hutten met Hoogstraten, Johannes Rhagius (also known as Johannes Aesticampianus), and other scholars and poets. In 1506, he went to Erfurt, but soon after rejoined Rhagius at Frankfurt an der Oder where a new university was opening. There he took his master's degree and published his first poem. In 1507, he followed Rhagius to Leipzig. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica reported that, in 1508, a shipwrecked beggar on the Pomeranian coast, while the New International Encyclopedia described him as stricken down with the pestilence and recovering.
  In 1509, he was studying theology at the University of Greifswald, where he was at first received kindly. In 1510 he spent time further studying theology at Wittenberg University.
  However his burgher patrons could not tolerate the poet's airs and vanity and ill-timed assertions of his higher rank. Wherefore Hutten 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.
  In Rostock, 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, and he wandered on to Wittenberg, where in 1511 he published his Ars Versificatoria, a work on versification. 
  His next stop was 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.
  So Hutten went on to Italy, and settled at Pavia to study law. In 1512, 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 served for a short time as a private soldier in the emperor's army, but by 1514 was back in Germany.
  Thanks to his poetic gifts and the friendship of Eitelwolf von Stein (d. 1515), he won the favour of the elector of Mainz, Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg. Here high dreams of a learned career rose on him: Mainz should be made the metropolis of a grand humanist movement, the centre of good style and literary form.
caption: Plaque to Ulrich von Hutten, Schlossstrasse, Wittenberg
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