Chapter III. The Renaissance.(16)

§ 1. The Transition from the Mediæval to the Modern World.

The movement called the Renaissance, in its widest extent, may be described as the transition from the mediæval to the modern world. All our present conceptions of life and thought find their roots within this period.

It saw the beginnings of modern science and the application of true scientific methods to the investigation of nature. It witnessed the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, the foundation of anatomy under Vessalius, and the discovery of the circulation of the blood by Harvey.

It was the age of geographical explorations. The discoveries of the telescope, the mariner’s compass, and gunpowder gave men mastery over previously unknown natural forces, and multiplied their powers, their daring, and their capacities for adventure. When these geographical discoveries had made a world-trade a possible thing, there began that change from mediæval to modern methods in trade and commerce which lasted from the close of the fourteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the modern commercial conditions were thoroughly established. The transition period was marked by the widening area of trade, which was no longer restricted to the Mediterranean, the Black and the North Seas, to the Baltic, and to the east coasts of Africa. The rigid groups of artisans and traders—the guild system of the Middle Ages—began to dissolve, and to leave freer space for individual and new corporate effort. Prices were gradually freed from official regulation, and became subject to the natural effects of bargaining. Adventure companies were started to share in the world-trade, and a beginning was made of dealing on commissions. All these changes belong to the period of transition between the mediæval and the modern world.

In the art of governing men the Renaissance was the age of political concentration. In two realms—Germany and Italy—the mediæval conceptions of Emperor and Pope, world-king and world-priest, were still strong enough to prevent the union of national forces under one political head; but there, also, the principle of coalescence may be found in partial operation,—in Germany in the formation of great independent principalities, and in Italy in the growth of the States of the Church,—and its partial failure subjected both nationalities to foreign oppression. Everywhere there was the attempt to assert the claims of the secular powers to emancipate themselves from clerical tutelage and ecclesiastical usurpation. While, underlying all, there was the beginning of the assertion of the supreme right of individual revolt against every custom, law, or theory which would subordinate the man to the caste or class. The Swiss peasantry began it when they made pikes by tying their scythes to their alpenstocks, and, standing shoulder to shoulder at Morgarten and Sempach, broke the fiercest charges of mediæval knighthood. They proved that man for man the peasant was as good as the noble, and individual manhood asserted in this rude and bodily fashion soon began to express itself mentally and morally.

In jurisprudence the Renaissance may be described as the introduction of historical and scientific methods, the abandonment of legal fictions based upon collections of false decretals, the recovery of the true text of the Roman code, and the substitution of civil for canon law as the basis of legislation and government. There was a complete break with the past. The substitution of civil law based upon the lawbooks of Justinian for the canon law founded upon the Decretum of Gratian, involved such a breach in continuity that it was the most momentous of all the changes of that period of transition. For law enters into every human relation, and a thorough change of legal principles must involve a revolution which is none the less real that it works almost silently. The codes of Justinian and of Theodosius completely reversed the teachings of the canonists, and the civilian lawyers learned to look upon the Church as only a department of the State.

In literature there was the discovery of classical manuscripts, the introduction of the study of Greek, the perception of the beauties of language in the choice and arrangement of words under the guidance of classical models. The literary powers of modern languages were also discovered,—Italian, English, French, and German,—and with the discovery the national literatures of Europe came into being.

In art a complete revolution was effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of ancient models and the study of the principles of their construction.

The manufacture of paper, the discovery of the arts of printing and engraving, multiplied the possession of the treasures of the intelligence and of artistic genius, and combined to make art and literature democratic. What was once confined to a favoured few became common property. New thoughts could act on men in masses, and began to move the multitude. The old mediæval barriers were broken down, and men came to see that there was more in religion than the mediæval Church had taught, more in social life than feudalism had manifested, and that knowledge was a manifold unknown to their fathers.

If the Renaissance be the transition from the mediæval to the modern world,—and it is scarcely possible to regard it otherwise,—then it is one of those great movements of the mind of mankind that almost defy exact description, and there is an elusiveness about it which confounds us when we attempt definition. “It was the emancipation of the reason,” says Symonds, “in a race of men, intolerant of control, ready to criticise canons of conduct, enthusiastic of antique liberty, freshly awakened to the sense of beauty, and anxious above all things to secure for themselves free scope in spheres outside the region of authority. Men so vigorous and independent felt the joy of exploration. There was no problem they feared to face, no formula they were not eager to recast according to their new conceptions.”(17) It was the blossoming and fructifying of the European intellectual life; but perhaps it ought to be added that it contained a new conception of the universe in which religion consisted less in a feeling of dependence on God, and more in a faith on the possibilities lying in mankind.

§ 2. The Revival of Literature and Art.

But the Renaissance has generally a more limited meaning, and one defined by the most potent of the new forces which worked for the general intellectual regeneration. It means the revival of learning and of art consequent on the discovery and study of the literary and artistic masterpieces of antiquity. It is perhaps in this more limited sense that the movement more directly prepared the way for the Reformation and what followed, and deserves more detailed examination. It was the discovery of a lost means of culture and the consequent awakening and diffusion of a literary, artistic, and critical spirit.

A knowledge of ancient Latin literature had not entirely perished during the earlier Middle Ages. The Benedictine monasteries had preserved classical manuscripts—especially the monastery of Monte Cassino for the southern, and that of Fulda for the northern parts of Europe. These monasteries and their sister establishments were schools of learning as well as libraries, and we read of more than one where the study of some of the classical authors was part of the regular training. Virgil, Horace, Terence and Martial, Livy, Suetonius and Sallust, were known and studied. Greek literature had not survived to anything like the same extent, but it had never entirely disappeared from Southern Europe, and especially from Southern Italy. Ever since the days of the Roman Republic in that part of the Italian peninsula once called Magna Græcia, Greek had been the language of many of the common people, as it is to this day, in districts of Calabria and of Sicily; and the teachers and students of the mediæval University of Salerno had never lost their taste for its study.(18) But with all this, the fourteenth century, and notably the age of Petrarch, saw the beginnings of new zeal for the literature of the past, and was really the beginning of a new era.

Italy was the first land to become free from the conditions of mediæval life, and ready to enter on the new life which was awaiting Europe. There was an Italian language, the feeling of distinct nationality, a considerable advance in civilisation, an accumulation of wealth, and, during the age of the despots, a comparative freedom from constant changes in political conditions.

Dante’s great poem, interweaving as it does the imagery and mysticism of Giacchino di Fiore, the deepest spiritual and moral teaching of the mediæval Church, and the insight and judgment on men and things of a great poet, was the first sign that Italy had wakened from the sleep of the Middle Ages. Petrarch came next, the passionate student of the lives, the thoughts, and emotions of the great masters of classical Latin literature. They were real men for him, his own Italian ancestors, and they as he had felt the need of Hellenic culture to solace their souls, and serve for the universal education of the human race. Boccaccio, the third leader in the awakening, preached the joy of living, the universal capacity for pleasure, and the sensuous beauty of the world. He too, like Petrarch, felt the need of Hellenic culture. For both there was an awakening to the beauty of literary form, and the conviction that a study of the ancient classics would enable them to achieve it. Both valued the vision of a new conception of life derived from the perusal of the classics, freer, more enlarged and joyous, more rational than the Middle Ages had witnessed. Petrarch and Boccaccio yearned after the life thus disclosed, which gave unfettered scope to the play of the emotions, to the sense of beauty, and to the manifold activity of the human intelligence.

Learned Greeks were induced to settle in Italy—men who were able to interpret the ancient Greek poets and prose writers—Manuel Chrysoloras (at Florence, 1397-1400), George of Trebizond, Theodore Gaza (whose Greek _Grammar_ Erasmus taught from while in England), Gemistos Plethon, a distinguished Platonist, under whom the Christian Platonism received its impulse, and John Argyropoulos, who was the teacher of Reuchlin. The men of the early Renaissance were their pupils.

§ 3. Its earlier relation to Christianity.

There was nothing hostile to Christianity or to the mediæval Church in the earlier stages of this intellectual revival, and very little of the neo-paganism which it developed afterwards. Many of the instincts of mediæval piety remained, only the objects were changed. Petrarch revered the MS. of Homer, which he could not read, as an ancestor of his might have venerated the scapulary of a saint.(19) The men of the early Renaissance made collections of MSS. and inscriptions, of cameos and of coins, and worshipped them as if they had been relics. The Medicean Library was formed about 1450, the Vatican Library in 1453, and the age of passionate collection began.

The age of scholarship succeeded, and Italian students began to interpret the ancient classical authors with a mysticism all their own. They sought a means of reconciling Christian thought with ancient pagan philosophy, and, like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, discovered it in Platonism. Platonic academies were founded, and Cardinal Bessarion, Marsiglio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola became the Christian Platonists of Italy. Of course, in their enthusiasm they went too far. They appropriated the whole intellectual life of a pagan age, and adopted its ethical as well as its intellectual perceptions, its basis of sensuous pleasures, and its joy in sensuous living. Still their main thought was to show that Hellenism as well as Judaism was a pathway to Christianity, and that the Sibyl as well as David was a witness for Christ.

The Papacy lent its patronage to the revival of literature and art, and put itself at the head of the movement of intellectual life. Pope Nicolas V. (1447-1455) was the first Bishop of Rome who fostered the Renaissance, and he himself may be taken as representing the sincerity, the simplicity, and the lofty intellectual and artistic aims of its earliest period. Sprung from an obscure family belonging to Saranza, a small town near Spezzia, and cast on his own resources before he had fairly quitted boyhood, he had risen by his talents and his character to the highest position in the Church. He had been private tutor, secretary, librarian, and through all a genuine lover of books. They were the only personal luxury he indulged in, and perhaps no one in his days knew more about them. He was the confidential adviser of Lorenzo de Medici when he founded his great library in San Marco. He himself began the Vatican Library. He had agents who ransacked the monasteries of Europe, and he collected the literary relics which had escaped destruction in the sack of Constantinople. Before his death his library in the Vatican contained more than 5000 MSS. He gathered round him a band of illustrious artists and scholars. He filled Rome with skilled and artistic artisans, with decorators, jewellers, workers in painted glass and embroidery. The famous Leo Alberti was one of his architects, and Fra Angelico one of his artists. Laurentius Valla and Poggio Bracciolini, Cardinal Bessarion and George of Trebizond, were among his scholars. He directed and inspired their work. Valla’s critical attacks on the Donation of Constantine, and on the tradition that the Twelve had dictated the Apostles’ Creed, did not shake his confidence in the scholar. The principal Greek authors were translated into Latin by his orders. Europe saw theology, learning, and art lending each other mutual support under the leadership of the head of the Church. Perhaps Julius II. (1503-1513) conceived more definitely than even Nicolas had done that one duty of the head of the Church was to assume the leadership of the intellectual and artistic movement which was making wider the thought of Europe,—only his restless energy never permitted him leisure to give effect to his conception. “The instruction which Pope Julius II. gave to Michelangelo to represent him as Moses can bear but one interpretation: that Julius set himself the mission of leading forth Israel (the Church) from its state of degradation, and showing it—though he could not grant possession—the Promised Land at least from afar, that blessed land which consists in the enjoyment of the highest intellectual benefits, and the training and consecration of all the faculties of man’s mind to union with God.”(20)

The classical revival in Italy soon exhausted itself. Its sensuous perceptions degenerated into sensuality, its instinct for the beauty of expression into elegant trifling, and its enthusiasm for antiquity into neo-paganism. It failed almost from the first in real moral earnestness; scarcely saw, and still less understood, how to cure the deep-seated moral evils of the age.

Italy had given birth to the Renaissance, but it soon spread to the more northern lands. Perhaps France first felt the impulse, then Germany and England last of all. In dealing with the Reformation, the movement in Germany is the most important.

The Germans, throughout the Middle Ages, had continuous and intimate relations with the southern peninsula, and in the fifteenth century these were stronger than ever. German merchants had their factories in Venice and Genoa; young German nobles destined for a legal or diplomatic career studied law at Italian universities; students of medicine completed their studies in the famous southern schools; and the German wandering student frequently crossed the Alps to pick up additional knowledge. There was such constant scholarly intercourse between Germany and Italy, that the New Learning could not fail to spread among the men of the north.

§ 4. The Brethren of the Common Lot.

Germany and the Low Countries had been singularly prepared for that revival of letters, art, and science which had come to Italy. One of the greatest gifts bestowed by the Mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on their native land had been an excellent system of school education. Gerard Groot, a disciple of the Flemish mystic Jan van Rysbroeck, had, after long consultations with his Master, founded a brotherhood called the _Brethren of the Common Life_,(21) whose aim was to better the religious condition of their fellow-men by the multiplication of good books and by the careful training of the young. They were to support themselves by copying and selling manuscripts. All the houses of the Brethren had a large room, where a number of scribes sat at tables, a reader repeated slowly the words of the manuscript, and books were multiplied as rapidly as was possible before the invention of printing. They filled their own libraries with the best books of Christian and pagan antiquity. They multiplied small tracts containing the mystical and practical theology of the _Friends of God_, and sent them into circulation among the people. One of the intimate followers of Groot, Florentius Radewynsohn, proved to be a distinguished educationalist, and the schools of the Order soon became famous. The Brethren, to use the words of their founder, employed education for the purpose of “raising spiritual pillars in the Temple of the Lord.” They insisted on a study of the Vulgate in their classes; they placed German translations of Christian authors in the hands of their pupils; they took pains to give them a good knowledge of Latin, and read with them selections from the best known ancient authors; they even taught a little Greek; and their scholars learned to sing the simpler, more evangelical Latin hymns.

The mother school was at Deventer, a town situated at the south-west corner of the great episcopal territory of Utrecht, now the Dutch province of Ober-Yessel. It lies on the bank of that branch of the Rhine (the Yessel) which flowing northwards glides past Zutphen, Deventer, Zwolle, and loses itself in the Zuyder Zee at Kampen. A large number of the more distinguished leaders of the fifteenth century owed their early training to this great school at Deventer. During the last decades of the fifteenth century the headmaster was Alexander Hegius (1433-1498), who came to Deventer in 1471 and remained there until his death.(22) The school reached its height of fame under this renowned master, who gathered 2000 pupils around him,—among them Erasmus, Conrad Mutti (Mutianus Rufus), Hermann von Busch, Johann Murmellius,—and, rejecting the older methods of grammatical instruction, taught them to know the niceties of the Latin tongue by leading them directly to the study of the great writers of classical antiquity. He was such an indefatigable student that he kept himself awake during the night-watches, it is said, by holding in his hands the candle which lighted him, in order to be wakened by its fall should slumber overtake him. The glory of Deventer perished with this great teacher, who to the last maintained the ancient traditions of the school by his maxim, that learning without piety was rather a curse than a blessing.

Other famous schools of the Brethren in the second half of the fifteenth century were Schlettstadt,(23) in Elsass, some miles from the west bank of the Rhine, and about half-way between Strassburg and Basel; Munster on the Ems, the Monasterium of the earlier Middle Ages; Emmerich, a town on the Rhine near the borders of Holland, and Altmarck, in the north-west. Schlettstadt, under its master Ludwig Dringenberg, almost rivalled the fame of Deventer, and many of the members of the well-known Strassburg circle which gathered round Jacob Wimpheling, Sebastian Brand, and the German Savonarola, John Geiler von Keysersberg, had been pupils in this school. Besides these more famous establishments, the schools of the Brethren spread all over Germany. The teachers were commonly called the _Roll-Brueder_, and under this name they had a school in Magdeburg to which probably Luther was sent when he spent a year in that town. Their work was so pervading and their teaching so effectual, that we are informed by chroniclers, who had nothing to do with the Brethren, that in many German towns, girls could be heard singing the simpler Latin hymns, and that the children of artisans could converse in Latin.

§ 5. German Universities, Schools, and Scholarship.

The desire for education spread all over Germany in the fifteenth century. Princes and burghers vied with each other in erecting seats of learning. Within one hundred and fifty years no fewer than seventeen new universities were founded. Prag, a Bohemian foundation, came into existence in 1348. Then followed four German foundations, Vienna, in 1365 or 1384; Heidelberg, in 1386; Köln, in 1388; and Erfurt, established by the townspeople, in 1392. In the fifteenth century there were Leipzig, in 1409; Rostock, on the shore of what was called the East Sea, almost opposite the south point of Sweden, in 1419; Cracow, a Polish foundation, in 1420; Greifswald, in 1456; Freiburg and Trier, in 1457; Basel, in 1460; Ingolstadt, founded with the special intention of training students in obedience to the Pope, a task singularly well accomplished, in 1472; Tübingen and Mainz, in 1477; Wittenberg, in 1502; and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, in 1507. Marburg, the first Reformation University, was founded in 1527.

The craving for education laid hold on the burgher class, and towns vied with each other in providing superior schools, with teachers paid out of the town’s revenues. Some German towns had several such foundations. Breslau, “the student’s paradise,” had seven. Nor was the education of girls neglected. Frankfurt-on-the-Main founded a high school for girls early in the fifteenth century, and insisted that the teachers were to be learned ladies who were not nuns.(24) Besides the classrooms, the towns usually provided hostels, where the boys got lodging and sometimes firewood (they were expected to obtain food by begging through the streets of the town), and frequently hospitals where the scholars could be tended in illness.(25)

These possibilities of education attracted boys from all parts of the country, and added a new class of vagrants to the tramps of all kinds who infested the roads during the later Middle Ages. The wandering scholar, with his yellow scarf, was a feature of the era, and frequently not a reputable one. He was usually introduced as a character into the _Fastnachtspiele_, or rude popular carnival comedies, and was almost always a rogue and often a thief. Children of ten and twelve years of age left their villages, in charge of an older student, to join some famous school. But these older students were too often mere vagrants, with just learning enough to impose upon the simple peasantry, to whom they sold charms against toothache and other troubles. The young children entrusted to them by confiding parents were often treated with the greatest cruelty, employed by them to beg or steal food, and sent round to the public-houses with cans to beg for beer. The small unfortunates were the prisoners, the slaves, of their disreputable masters, and many of them died by the roadside. We need not wonder that Luther, with his memory full of these wandering students, in after days denounced the system by which men spent sometimes “twenty and even forty years” in a so-called student life, which was often one of the lowest vagrancy and debauchery, and in the end knew neither German nor Latin, “to say nothing,” he adds with honest indignation, “of the shameful and vicious life by which our worthy youth have been so grievously corrupted.” Two or three of the autobiographies of these wandering students have survived; and two of them, those of Thomas Platter and of Johann Butzbach, belong to Luther’s time, and give a vivid picture of their lives.(26)

Germany had no lack of schools and universities, but it can scarcely be said that they did more than serve as a preparation for the entrance of the Renaissance movement. During the fifteenth century all the Universities were under the influence of the Church, and Scholasticism prescribed the methods of study. Very little of the New Learning was allowed to enter. It is true that if Köln and perhaps Ingolstadt be excepted, the Scholastic which was taught represented what were supposed to be the more advanced opinions—those of John Duns Scotus, William of Occam, and Gabriel Biel, rather than the learning of Thomas Aquinas and other great defenders of papal traditions; but it lent itself as thoroughly as did the older Scholastic to the discussion of all kinds of verbal and logical subtleties. Knowledge of every kind was discussed under formulæ and phrases sanctioned by long scholastic use. It is impossible to describe the minute distinctions and the intricate reasoning based upon them without exceeding the space at our disposal. It is enough to say that the prevailing course of study furnished an imposing framework without much solid content, and provided an intellectual gymnastic without much real knowledge. A survival can be seen in the Formal Logic still taught. The quantity of misspent ingenuity called forth to produce the figures and moods, and bestowed on discovering and arranging all possible moods under each figure and in providing all with mnemonic names,—_Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris_, etc.,—affords some insight into the scholastic methods in use in these universities of the fifteenth century.

Then it must be remembered that the scholarship took a quasi-ecclesiastical form. The universities were all monastic institutions, where the teachers were professional and the students amateur celibates. The scholars were gathered into hostels in which they lived with their teachers, and were taught to consider themselves very superior persons. The statutes of mediæval Oxford declare that God created “clerks” with gifts of intelligence denied to mere lay persons; that it behoved “clerks” to exhibit this difference by their outward appearance; and that the university tailors, whose duty it was to make men _extrinsecus_ what God had made them _intrinsecus_, were to be reckoned as members of the University. Those mediæval students sometimes assumed airs which roused the passions of the laity, and frequently led to tremendous riots. Thus in 1513 the townsfolk of Erfurt battered in the gates of the University with cannon, and after the flight of the professors and students destroyed almost all the archives and library. About the same time some citizens of Vienna having jeered at the sacred student dress, there ensued the “Latin war,” which literally devastated the town. This pride of separation between “clerks” and laity culminated in the great annual procession, when the newly capped graduates, clothed in all the glory of new bachelors’ and masters’ gowns and hoods, marched through the principal streets of the university town, in the midst of the university dignitaries and frequently attended by the magistrates in their robes. Young Luther confessed that when he first saw the procession at Erfurt he thought that no position on earth was more enviable than that of a newly capped graduate.

Mediæval ecclesiastical tradition brooded over all departments of learning; and the philosophy and logic, or what were supposed to be the philosophy and logic, of Aristotle ruled that tradition. The reverence for the name of Aristotle almost took the form of a religious fervour. In a curious mediæval _Life of Aristotle_ the ancient pagan thinker is declared to be a forerunner of Christ. All who refused to accept his guidance were heretics, and his formal scheme of thought was supposed to justify the refined sophisms of mediæval dialectic. His system of thought was the fortified defence which preserved the old and protected it from the inroads of the New Learning. Hence the hatred which almost all the German Humanists seem to have had for the name of Aristotle. The attitudes of the partisans of the old and of the new towards the ancient Greek thinker are represented in two pictures, each instinct with the feeling of the times. In one, in the church of the Dominicans in Pisa, Aristotle is represented standing on the right with Plato on the left of Thomas Aquinas, and rays streaming from their opened books make a halo round the head of the great mediæval theologian and thinker. In the other, a woodcut published by Hans Holbein the younger in 1527, Aristotle with the mediæval doctors is represented descending into the abodes of darkness, while Jesus Christ stands in the foreground and points out the true light to a crowd of people, among whom the artist has figured peasants with their flails.

§ 6. The earlier German Humanists.

When the beginnings of the New Learning made their appearance in Germany, they did not bring with them any widespread revival of culture. There was no outburst, as in Italy, of the artistic spirit, stamping itself upon such arts as painting, sculpture, and architecture, which could appeal to the whole public intelligence. The men who first felt the stirrings of the new intellectual life were, for the most part, students who had been trained in the more famous schools of the _Brethren of the Common Life_, all of whom had a serious aim in life. The New Learning appealed to them not so much a means of self-culture as an instrument to reform education, to criticise antiquated methods of instruction, and, above all, to effect reforms in the Church and to purify the social life. One of the most conspicuous of such scholars was Cardinal Nicolas Cusanus(27) (1401-1464). He was a man of singularly open mind, who, while he was saturated with the old learning, was able to appreciate the new. He had studied the classics in Italy. He was an expert mathematician and astronomer. Some have even asserted that he anticipated the discoveries of Galileo. The instruments with which he worked, roughly made by a village tinsmith, may still be seen preserved in the Brother-house which he founded at his birthplace, Cues, on the Mosel; and there, too, the sheets, covered with his long calculations for the reform of the calendar, may still be studied.

Another scholar, sent out by the same schools, was John Wessel of Gröningen (1420-1489), who wandered in search of learning from Köln to Paris and from Paris to Italy. He finally settled down as a canon in the Brotherhood of Mount St. Agnes. There he gathered round him a band of young students, whom he encouraged to study Greek and Hebrew. He was a theologian who delighted to criticise the current opinions on theological doctrines. He denied that the fire of Purgatory could be material fire, and he theorised about indulgences in such a way as to be a forerunner of Luther.(28) “If I had read his books before,” said Luther, “my enemies might have thought that Luther had borrowed everything from Wessel, so great is the agreement between our spirits. I feel my joy and my strength increase, I have no doubt that I have taught aright, when I find that one who wrote at a different time, in another clime, and with a different intention, agrees so entirely in my view and expresses it in almost the same words.”

Other like-minded scholars might be mentioned, Rudolph Agricola(29) (1442-1485), Jacob Wimpheling(30) (1450-1528), and Sebastian Brand (1457-1521), who was town-clerk of Strassburg from 1500, and the author of the celebrated _Ship of Fools_, which was translated into many languages, and was used by his friend Geiler of Keysersberg as the text for one of his courses of popular sermons.

All these men, and others like-minded and similarly gifted, are commonly regarded as the precursors of the German Renaissance, and are classed among the German Humanists. Yet it may be questioned whether they can be taken as the representatives of that kind of Humanism which gathered round Luther in his student days, and of which Ulrich von Hutten, the stormy petrel of the times of the Reformation, was a notable example. Its beginnings must be traced to other and less reputable pioneers. Numbers of young German students, with the talent for wandering and for supporting themselves by begging possessed by so many of them, had tramped down to Italy, where they contrived to exist precariously while they attended, with a genuine thirst for learning, the classes taught by Italian Humanists. There they became infected with the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and learned also to despise the ordinary restraints of moral living. There they imbibed a contempt for the Church and for all kinds of theology, and acquired the genuine temperament of the later Italian Humanists, which could be irreligious without being anti-religious, simply because religion of any sort was something foreign to their nature.

Such a man was Peter Luders (1415-1474). He began life as an ecclesiastic, wandered down into Italy, where he devoted himself to classical studies, and where he acquired the irreligious disposition and the disregard for ordinary moral living which disgraced a large part of the later Italian Humanists. While living at Padua (1444), where he acted as private tutor to some young Germans from the Palatinate, he was invited by the Elector to teach Latin in the University of Heidelberg. The older professors were jealous of him: they insisted on reading and revising his introductory lecture: they refused him the use of the library; and in general made his life a burden. He struggled on till 1460. Then he spent many years in wandering from place to place, teaching the classics privately to such scholars as he could find. He was not a man of reputable life, was greatly given to drink, a free liver in every way, and thoroughly irreligious, with a strong contempt for all theology. He seems to have contrived when sober to keep his heretical opinions to himself, but to have betrayed himself occasionally in his drinking bouts. When at Basel he was accused of denying the doctrine of Three Persons in the Godhead, and told his accusers that he would willingly confess to four if they would only let him alone. He ended his days as a teacher of medicine in Vienna.

History has preserved the names of several of these wandering scholars who sowed the seeds of classical studies in Germany, and there were, doubtless, many who have been forgotten. Loose living, irreligious, their one gift a genuine desire to know and impart a knowledge of the ancient classical literature, careless how they fared provided only they could study and teach Latin and Greek, they were the disreputable apostles of the New Learning, and in their careless way scattered it over the northern lands.

§ 7. The Humanist Circles in the Cities.

The seed-beds of the German Renaissance were at first not so much the Universities, as associations of intimates in some of the cities. Three were pre-eminent,—Strassburg, Augsburg, and Nürnberg,—all wealthy imperial cities, having intimate relations with the imperial court on the one hand and with Italy on the other.

The Humanist circle at Nürnberg was perhaps the most distinguished, and it stood in closer relations than any other with the coming Reformation. Its best known member was Willibald Pirkheimer(31) (1470-1528), whose training had been more that of a young Florentine patrician than of the son of a German burgher. His father, a wealthy Nürnberg merchant of great intellectual gifts and attainments, a skilled diplomatist, and a confidential friend of the Emperor Maximilian, superintended his son’s education. He took the boy with him on the journeys which trade or the diplomatic business of his city compelled him to make, and initiated him into the mysteries of commerce and of German politics. The lad was also trained in the knightly accomplishments of horsemanship and the skilful use of weapons. He was sent, like many a young German patrician, to Padua and Pavia (1490-1497) to study jurisprudence and the science of diplomacy, and was advised not to neglect opportunities to acquire the New Learning. When he returned, in his twenty-seventh year, he was appointed one of the counsellors of the city, and was entrusted with an important share in the management of its business. In this capacity it was necessary for him to make many a journey to the Diet or to the imperial court, and he soon became a favourite with the Emperor Maximilian, who rejoiced in converse with a mind as versatile as his own. No German so nearly approached the many-sided culture of the leading Italian Humanists as did this citizen of Nürnberg. On the other hand, he possessed a fund of earnestness which no Italian seems to have possessed. He was deeply anxious about reformation in Church and State, and after the Leipzig disputation had shown that Luther’s quarrel with the Pope was no mere monkish dispute, but went to the roots of things, he was a sedate supporter of the Reformation in its earlier stages. His sisters Charitas and Clara, both learned ladies, were nuns in the Convent of St. Clara at Nürnberg. The elder, who was the abbess of her convent, has left an interesting collection of letters, from which it seems probable that she had great influence over her brother, and prevented him from joining the Lutheran Church after it had finally separated from the Roman obedience.

Pirkheimer gave the time which was not occupied with public affairs to learning and intercourse with scholars. His house was a palace filled with objects of art. His library, well stocked with MSS. and books, was open to every student who came with an introduction to its owner. At his banquets, which were famous, he delighted to assemble round his table the most distinguished men of the day. He was quite at home in Greek, and made translations from the works of Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch, and Lucian into Latin or German. The description which he gives, in his familiar letters to his sisters and intimate friends, of his life on his brother-in-law’s country estate is like a picture of the habits of a Roman patrician of the fifth century in Gaul. The morning was spent in study, in reading Plato or Cicero; and in the afternoon, if the gout chanced to keep him indoors, he watched from his windows the country people in the fields, or the sportsman and the fisher at their occupations. He was fond of entertaining visitors from the neighbourhood. Sometimes he gathered round him his upper servants or his tenants, with their wives and families. The evening was usually devoted to the study of history and archæology, in both of which he was greatly interested. He was in the habit of sitting up late at night, and when the sky was clear he followed the motions of the planets with a telescope; for, like many others in that age, he had faith in astrology, and believed that he could read future events and the destinies of nations in the courses of the wandering stars.

In all those civic circles, poets and artists were found as members—Hans Holbein at Augsburg; Albert Dürer, with Hans Sebaldus Beham, at Nürnberg. The contemporary Italian painters, when they ceased to select their subjects from Scripture or from the Lives of the Saints, turned instinctively to depict scenes from the ancient pagan mythology. The German artists strayed elsewhere. They turned for subjects to the common life of the people. But the change was gradual. The Virgin ceased to be the Queen of Heaven and became the purest type of homely human motherhood, and the attendant angels, sportive children plucking flowers, fondling animals, playing with fruit. In Lucas Cranach’s “Rest on the Flight to Egypt” two cherubs have climbed a tree to rob a bird’s nest, and the parent birds are screaming at them from the branches. In one of Albert Dürer’s representations of the Holy Family, the Virgin and Child are seated in the middle of a farmyard, surrounded by all kinds of rural accessories. Then German art plunged boldly into the delineation of the ordinary commonplace life—knights and tournaments, merchant trains, street scenes, pictures of peasant life, and especially of peasant dances, university and school scenes, pictures of the camp and of troops on the march. The coming revolution in religion was already proclaiming that all human life, even the most commonplace, could be sacred; and contemporary art discovered the picturesque in the ordinary life of the people—in the castles of the nobles, in the markets of the cities, and in the villages of the peasants.

§ 8. Humanism in the Universities.

The New Learning made its way gradually into the Universities. Classical scholars were invited to lecture or settle as private teachers in university towns, and the students read Cicero and Virgil, Horace and Propertius, Livy and Sallust, Plautus and Terence. One of the earliest signs of the growing Humanist feeling appeared in changes in one of the favourite diversions of German students. In all the mediæval Universities at carnival time the students got up and performed plays. The subjects were almost invariably taken from the Scriptures or from the Apocrypha. Chaucer says of an Oxford student, that

“Sometimes to shew his lightnesse and his mastereye He played Herod on a gallows high.”

At the end of the fifteenth century the subjects changed, and students’ plays were either reproductions from Plautus or Terence, or original compositions representing the common life of the time.

The legal recognition of Humanism within a University commonly showed itself in the institution of a lectureship of Poetry or Oratory—for the German Humanists were commonly known as the “Poets.” Freiburg established a chair of Poetry in 1471, and Basel in 1474; in Tübingen the stipend for an Orator was legally sanctioned in 1481, and Conrad Celtis was appointed to a chair of Poetry and Eloquence in 1492.

Erfurt, however, was generally regarded as the special nursery of German university Humanism ever since Peter Luders had taught there in 1460. From that date the University never lacked Humanist teachers, and a Humanist circle had gradually grown up among the successive generations of students. The permanent chief of this circle was a German scholar, whose name was Conrad Mut (Mudt, Mutta, and Mutti are variations), who Latinised his name into Mutianus, and added Rufus because he was red-haired. This Mutianus Rufus was in many respects a typical German Humanist. He was born in 1472 at Homburg in Hesse, had studied at Deventer under Alexander Hegius, had attended the University of Erfurt, and had then gone to Italy to study law and the New Learning. He became a Doctor of Laws of Bologna, made friends among many of the distinguished Italian Humanists, and had gained many patrons among the cardinals in Rome. He finally settled in Gotha, where he had received a canonry in the Church. He did not win any distinction as an author, but has left behind him an interesting collection of letters. His great delight was to gather round him promising young students belonging to the University of Erfurt, to superintend their reading, and to advise them in all literary matters. While in Italy he had become acquainted with Pico della Mirandola, and had adopted the conception of combining Platonism and Christianity in an eclectic mysticism, which was to be the esoteric Christianity for thinkers and educated men, while the popular Christianity, with its superstitions, was needed for the common herd. Christianity, he taught, had its beginnings long before the historical advent of our Lord. “The true Christ,” he said, “was not a man, but the Wisdom of God; He was the Son of God, and is equally imparted to the Jews, the Greeks, and the Germans.”(32) “The true Christ is not a man, but spirit and soul, which do not manifest themselves in outward appearance, and are not to be touched or seized by the hands.”(33) “The law of God,” he said in another place, “which enlightens the soul, has two heads: to love God, and to love one’s neighbour as one’s self. This law makes us partakers of Heaven. It is a natural law; not hewn in stone, as was the law of Moses; not carved in bronze, as was that of the Romans; not written on parchment or paper, but implanted in our hearts by the highest Teacher.” “Whoever has eaten in pious manner this memorable and saving Eucharist, has done something divine. For the true Body of Christ is peace and concord, and there is no holier Host than neighbourly love.”(34) He refused to believe in the miraculous, and held that the Scriptures were full of fables, meant, like those of Æsop, to teach moral truths. He asserted that he had devoted himself to “God, the saints, and the study of all antiquity”; and the result was expressed in the following quotation from a letter to Urban (1505), one of his friends and pupils at Erfurt: “There is but one god and one goddess; but there are many forms and many names—Jupiter, Sol, Apollo, Moses, Christ, Luna, Ceres, Proserpina, Tellus, Mary. But do not spread it abroad; we must keep silence on these Eleusinian mysteries. In religious matters we must employ fables and enigmas as a veil. Thou who hast the grace of Jupiter, the best and greatest God, shouldst in secret despise the little gods. When I say Jupiter, I mean Christ and the true God. But enough of these things, which are too high for us.”(35) Such a man looked with contempt on the Church of his age, and lashed it with his scorn. “I do not revere the coat or the beard of Christ; I revere the true and living God, who has neither beard nor coat.”(36) In private he denounced the fasts of the Church, confession, and masses for the dead, and called the begging friars “cowled monsters.” He says sarcastically of the Christianity of his times: “We mean by faith not the conformity of what we say with fact, but an opinion about divine things founded on credulity and a persuasion which seeks after profit. Such is its power that it is commonly believed that to us were given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whoever, therefore, despises our keys, shall feel our nails and our clubs (_quisquis claves contemserit clavum et clavam sentiet_). We have taken from the breast of Serapis a magical stamp to which Jesus of Galilee has given authority. With that figure we put our foes to flight, we cozen money, we consecrate God, we shake hell, and we work miracles; whether we be heavenly minded or earthly minded makes no matter, provided we sit happily at the banquet of Jupiter.”(37) But he did not wish to revolt from the external authority of the Church of the day. “He is impious who wishes to know more than the Church. We bear on our forehead,” he says, “the seal of the Cross, the standard of our King. Let us not be deserters; let nothing base be found in our camp.”(38) The authority which the Humanists revolted against was merely intellectual, as was the freedom they fought for. It did not belong to their mission to proclaim a spiritual freedom or to free the common man from his slavish fear of the mediæval priesthood; and this made an impassable gulf between their aspirations and those of Luther and the real leaders of the Reformation movement.(39)

The Erfurt circle of Humanists had for members Heinrich Urban, to whom many of the letters of Mutianus were addressed, Petreius Alperbach, who won the title of “mocker of gods and men” (_derisor deorum et hominum_), Johann Jaeger of Dornheim (Crotus Rubeanus), George Burkhardt from Spalt (Spalatinus), Henry and Peter Eberach. Eoban of Hesse (Helius Eobanus Hessus), the most gifted of them all, and the hardest drinker, joined the circle in 1494.

Similar university circles were formed elsewhere: at Basel, where Heinrich Loriti from Glarus (Glareanus), and afterwards Erasmus, were the attractions; at Tübingen, where Heinrich Bebel, author of the _Facetiæ_, encouraged his younger friends to study history; and even at Köln, where Hermann von Busch, a pupil of Deventer, and Ortuin Gratius, afterwards the butt of the authors of the _Epistolæ obscurorum virorum_, were looked upon as leaders full of the New Learning.

As in Italy Popes and cardinals patronised the leaders of the Renaissance, so in Germany the Emperor and some princes gave their protection to Humanism. To German scholars, who were at the head of the new movement, Maximilian seemed to be an ideal ruler. His coffers no doubt were almost always empty, and he had not lucrative posts at his command to bestow upon them; the position of court poet given to Conrad Celtes and afterwards to Ulrich von Hutten brought little except coronation in presence of the imperial court with a tastefully woven laurel crown;(40) but the character of Maximilian attracted peasantry and scholars alike. His romanticism, his abiding youthfulness, his amazing intellectual versatility, his knight-errantry, and his sympathy fascinated them. Maximilian lives in the folk-song of Germany as no other ruler does. The scheme of education sung in the _Weisskunig_, and illustrated by Hans Burgmaier, entitled him to the name “the Humanist Emperor.”

§ 9. Reuchlin.

The German Humanists, whether belonging to the learned societies of the cities or to the groups in the Universities, were too full of individuality to present the appearance of a body of men leagued together under the impulse of a common aim. The Erfurt band of scholars was called “the Mutianic Host”; but the partisans of the New Learning could scarcely be said to form a solid phalanx. Something served, however, to bring them all together. This was the persecution of Reuchlin.

Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), like Erasmus after him, was very much a man by himself. He entered history at first dramatically enough. A party of Italian Humanists had met in the house of John Argyropoulos in Rome in 1483. Among them was a young unknown German, who had newly arrived with letters of introduction to the host. He had come, he explained, to study Greek. Argyropoulos gave him a Thucydides and asked him to construe a page or two into Latin. Reuchlin construed with such ease and elegance, that the company exclaimed that Greece had flown across the Alps to settle in Germany. The young German spent some years in Italy, enjoying the friendship of the foremost Italian scholars. He was an ardent student of the New Learning, and on his return was the first to make Greek thoroughly popular in Germany. But he was a still more ardent student of Hebrew, and it may almost be said of him that he introduced that ancient language to the peoples of Europe. His _De Rudimentis Hebraicis_ (1506), a grammar and dictionary in one, was the first book of its kind. His interest in the language was more than that of a student. He believed that Hebrew was not only the most ancient, but the holiest of languages. God had spoken in it. He had revealed Himself to men not merely in the Hebrew writings of the Old Testament, but had also imparted, through angels and other divine messengers, a hidden wisdom which has been preserved in ancient Hebrew writings outside of the Scriptures,—a wisdom known to Adam, to Noah, and to the Patriarchs. He expounded his strange mystical theosophy in a curious little book, _De Verbo Mirifico_ (1494), full of out-of-the-way learning, and finding sublime mysteries in the very points of the Hebrew Scriptures. Perhaps his central thought is expressed in the sentence, “God is love; man is hope; the bond between them is faith.... God and man may be so combined in an indescribable union that the human God and the divine man may be considered as one being.”(41) The book is a _Symposium_ where Sidonius, Baruch, and Capnion (Reuchlin) hold prolonged discourse with each other.

Reuchlin was fifty-four years of age when a controversy began which gradually divided the scholars of Germany into two camps, and banded the Humanists into one party fighting in defence of free inquiry.

John Pfefferkorn (1469-1522), born a Jew and converted to Christianity (1505), animated with the zeal of a convert to bring the Jews wholesale to Christianity, and perhaps stimulated by the Dominicans of Köln (Cologne), with whom he was closely associated, conceived an idea that his former co-religionists might be induced to accept Christianity if all their peculiar books, the Old Testament excepted, were confiscated. During the earlier Middle Ages the Jews had been continually persecuted, and their persecution had always been popular; but the fifteenth century had been a period of comparative rest for them; they had bought the imperial protection, and their services as physicians had been gratefully recognised in Frankfurt and many other cities.(42) Still the popular hatred against them as usurers remained, and manifested itself in every time of social upheaval. It was always easy to arouse the slumbering antipathy.

Pfefferkorn had written four books against the Jews (_Judenspiegel_, _Judenbeichte_, _Osternbuch_, _Jeudenfeind_) in the years 1507-1509, in which he had suggested that the Jews should be forbidden to practise usury, that they should be compelled to listen to sermons, and that their Hebrew books should be confiscated. He actually got a mandate from the Emperor Maximilian, probably through some corrupt secretary, empowering him to seize upon all such books. He began his work in the Rhineland, and had already confiscated the books of many Jews, when, in the summer of 1509, he came to Reuchlin and requested his aid. The scholar not only refused, but pointed out some irregularities in the imperial mandate. The doubtful legality of the imperial order had also attracted the attention of Uriel, the Archbishop of Mainz, who forbade his clergy from rendering Pfefferkorn any assistance.

Upon this Pfefferkorn and the Dominicans again applied to the Emperor, got a second mandate, then a third, which was the important one. It left the matter in the hands of the Archbishop of Mainz, who was to collect evidence on the subject of Jewish books. He was to ask the opinions of Reuchlin, of Victor von Karben (1422-1515), who had been a Jew but was then a Christian priest, of James Hochstratten (1460-1527), a Dominican and Inquisitor to the diocese of Köln, a strong foe to Humanism, and of the Universities of Heidelberg, Erfurt, Köln, and Mainz. They were to write out their opinions and send them to Pfefferkorn, who was to present them to the Emperor. Reuchlin was accordingly asked by the Archbishop to advise the Emperor “whether it would be praiseworthy and beneficial to our holy religion to destroy such books as the Jews used, excepting only the books of the Ten Commandments of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalter of the Old Testament?” Reuchlin’s answer was ready by November 1510. He went into the matter very thoroughly and impartially. He divided the books of the Jews into several classes, and gave his opinion on each. It was out of the question to destroy the Old Testament. The Talmud was a collection of expositions of the Jewish law at various periods; no one could express an opinion about it unless he had read it through; Reuchlin had only been able to procure portions; judging from these, it was likely that the book did contain many things contrary to Christianity, but that was the nature of the Jewish religion which was protected by law; it did contain many good things, and ought not to be destroyed. The Cabala was, according to Reuchlin, a very precious book, which assured us as no other did of the divinity of Christ, and ought to be carefully preserved. The Jews had various commentaries on the books of the Old Testament which were very useful to enable Christian scholars to understand them rightly, and they ought not to be destroyed. They had also sermons and ceremonial books belonging to their religion which had been guaranteed by imperial law. They had books on arts and sciences which ought to be destroyed only in so far as they taught such forbidden arts as magic. Lastly, there were books of poetry and fables, and some of them might contain insults to Christ, the Virgin, and the Apostles, and might deserve burning, but not without careful and competent examination. He added that the best way to deal with the Jews was not to burn their books, but to engage in reasonable, gentle, and kindly discussion.

Reuchlin’s opinion stood alone: all the other authorities suggested the burning of Jewish books, and the University of Mainz would not exempt the Old Testament until it had been shown that it had not been tampered with by Jewish zealots.

The temperate and scholarly answer of Reuchlin was made a charge against him. The controversy which followed, and which lasted for six weary years, was so managed by the Dominicans, that Reuchlin, a Humanist and a layman, was made to appear as defying the theologians of the Church on a point of theology. Like all mediæval controversies, it was conducted with great bitterness and no lack of invective, frequently coarse enough. The Humanists saw, however, that it was the case of a scholar defending genuine scholarship against obscurantists, and, after a fruitless endeavour to get Erasmus to lead them, they joined in a common attack. Artists also lent their aid. In one contemporary engraving, Reuchlin is seated in a car decked with laurels, and is in the act of entering his native town of Pforzheim. The Köln theologians march in chains before the car; Pfefferkorn lies on the ground with an executioner ready to decapitate him; citizens and their wives in gala costume await the hero, and the town’s musicians salute him with triumphant melody; while one worthy burgher manifests his sympathy by throwing a monk out of a window. The other side of the controversy is represented by a rough woodcut, in which Pfefferkorn is seen breaking the chair of scholarship in which a double-tongued Reuchlin is sitting.(43) The most notable contribution to the dispute, however, was the publication of the famous _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, inseparably connected with the name of Ulrich von Hutten.

§ 10. The “Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum.”

While the controversy was raging (1514), Reuchlin had collected a series of testimonies to his scholarship, and had published them under the title of _Letters from Eminent Men_.(44) This suggested to some young Humanist the idea of a collection of letters in which the obscurantists could be seen exposing themselves and their unutterable folly under the parodied title of _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_. The book bears the same relation to the scholastic disputations of the later fifteenth century that _Don Quixote_ does to the romances of mediæval chivalry. It is a farrago of questions on grammar, etymology, graduation precedence, life in a country parsonage, and scholastic casuistry. Magister Henricus Schaffsmulius writes from Rome that he went one Friday morning to breakfast in the Campo dei Fiori, ordered an egg, which on being opened contained a chicken. “Quick,” said his companion, “swallow it, or the landlord will charge the chicken in the bill.” He obeyed, forgetting that the day was Friday, on which no flesh could be eaten lawfully. In his perplexity he consulted one theologian, who told him to keep his mind at rest, for an embryo chicken within an egg was like the worms or maggots in fruit and cheese, which men can swallow without harm to their souls even in Lent. But another, equally learned, had informed him that maggots in cheese and worms in fruit were to be classed as fish, which everyone could eat lawfully on fast days, but that an embryo chicken was quite another thing—it was flesh. Would the learned Magister Ortuin, who knew everything, decide for him and relieve his burdened conscience? The writers send to their dear Magister Ortuin short Latin poems of which they are modestly proud. They confess that their verses do not scan; but that matters little. The writers of secular verse must be attentive to such things; but their poems, which relate the lives and deeds of the saints, do not need such refinements. The writers confess that at times their lives are not what they ought to be; but Solomon and Samson were not perfect; and they have too much Christian humility to wish to excel such honoured Christian saints. The letters contain a good deal of gossip about the wickedness of the poets (Humanists). These evil men have been speaking very disrespectfully about the Holy Coat at Trier (Treves); they have said that the Blessed Relics of the Three Kings at Köln are the bones of three Westphalian peasants. The correspondents exchange confidences about sermons they dislike. One preacher, who spoke with unseemly earnestness, had delivered a plain sermon without any learned syllogisms or intricate theological reasoning; he had spoken simply about Christ and His salvation, and the strange thing was that the people seemed to listen to him eagerly: such preaching ought to be forbidden. Allusions to Reuchlin and his trial are scattered all through the letters, and the writers reveal artlessly their hopes and fears about the result. It is possible, one laments, that the rascal may get off after all: the writer hears that worthy Inquisitor Hochstratten’s money is almost exhausted, and that he has scarcely enough left for the necessary bribery at Rome; it is to be hoped that he will get a further supply. It is quite impossible to translate the epistles and retain the original flavour of the language,—a mixture of ecclesiastical phrases, vernacular idioms and words, and the worst mediæval Latin. Of course, the letters contain much that is very objectionable: they attack the character of men, and even of women; but that was an ordinary feature of the Humanism of the times. They were undoubtedly successful in covering the opponents of Reuchlin with ridicule, more especially when some of the obscurantists failed to see the satire, and looked upon the letters as genuine accounts of the views they sympathised with. Some of the mendicant friars in England welcomed a book against Reuchlin, and a Dominican prior in Brabant bought several copies to send to his superiors.

The authorship of these famous letters is not thoroughly known; probably several Humanist pens were at work. It is generally admitted that they came from the Humanist circle at Erfurt, and that the man who planned the book and wrote most of the letters was John Jaeger of Dornheim (Crotus Rubeanus). They were long ascribed to Ulrich von Hutten; some of the letters may have come from his pen—one did certainly. These _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, when compared with the _Encomium Moriæ_ of Erasmus, show how immeasurably inferior the ordinary German Humanist was to the scholar of the Low Countries.(45)

§ 11. Ulrich von Hutten.

Ulrich von Hutten,(46) the stormy petrel of the Reformation period in Germany, was a member of one of the oldest families of the Franconian nobles—a fierce, lawless, turbulent nobility. The old hot family blood coursed through his veins, and accounts for much in his adventurous career. He was the eldest son, but his frail body and sickly disposition marked him out in his father’s eyes for a clerical life. He was sent at the age of eleven to the ancient monastery of Fulda, where his precocity in all kinds of intellectual work seemed to presage a distinguished position if he remained true to the calling to which his father had destined him. The boy, however, soon found that he had no vocation for the Church, and that, while he was keenly interested in all manner of studies, he detested the scholastic theology. He appealed to his father, told him how he hated the thought of a clerical life, and asked him to be permitted to look forward to the career of a scholar and a man of letters. The old Franconian knight was as hard as men of his class usually were. He promised Ulrich that he could take as much time as he liked to educate himself, but that in the end he was to enter the Church. Upon this, Ulrich, an obstinate chip of an obstinate block, determined to make his escape from the monastery and follow his own life. How he managed it is unknown. He fell in with John Jaeger of Dornheim, and the two wandered, German student fashion, from University to University; they were at Köln together, then at Erfurt. The elder Hutten refused to assist his son in any way. How the young student maintained himself no one knows. He had wretched health; he was at least twice robbed and half-murdered by ruffians as he tramped along the unsafe highways; but his indomitable purpose to live the life of a literary man or to die sustained him. At last family friends patched up a half-hearted reconciliation between father and son. They pointed out that the young man’s abilities might find scope in a diplomatic career since the Church was so distasteful to him, and the father was induced to permit him to go to Italy, provided he applied himself to the study of law. Ulrich went gladly to the land of the New Learning, reached Pavia, struggled on to Bologna, found that he liked law no better than theology, and began to write. It is needless to follow his erratic career. He succeeded frequently in getting patrons; but he was not the man to live comfortably in dependence; he always remembered that he was a Franconian noble; he had an irritable temper,—his wretched health furnishing a very adequate excuse.

It is probable that his sojourn in Italy did as much for him as for Luther, though in a different way. The Reformer turned with loathing from Italian, and especially from Roman wickedness. The Humanist meditated on the greatness of the imperial idea, now, he thought, the birthright of his Germany, which was being robbed of it by the Papacy. Henceforward he was dominated by one persistent thought.

He was a Humanist and a poet, but a man apart, marked out from among his fellows, destined to live in the memories of his nation when their names had been forgotten. They might be better scholars, able to write a finer Latinity, and pen trifles more elegantly; but he was a man with a purpose. His erratic and by no means pure life was ennobled by his sincere, if limited and unpractical, patriotism. He wrought, schemed, fought, flattered, and apostrophised to create a united Germany under a reformed Emperor. Whatever hindered this was to be attacked with what weapons of sarcasm, invective, and scorn were at his command; and the _one_ enemy was the Papacy of the close of the fifteenth century, and all that it implied. It was the Papacy that drained Germany of gold, that kept the Emperor in thraldom, that set one portion of the land against the other, that gave the separatist designs of the princes their promise of success. The Papacy was his Carthage, which must be destroyed.

Hutten was a master of invective, fearless, critically destructive; but he had small constructive faculty. It is not easy to discover what he meant by a reformation of the Empire—something loomed before him vague, grand, a renewal of an imagined past. Germany might be great, it is suggested in the _Inspicientes_ (written in 1520), if the Papacy were defied, if the princes were kept in their proper place of subordination, if a great imperial army were created and paid out of a common imperial fund,—an army where the officers were the knights, and the privates a peasant infantry (_landsknechts_). It is the passion for a German Imperial Unity which we find in all Hutten’s writings, from the early _Epistola ad Maximilianum Cæsarem Italiæ fictitia_, the _Vadiscus, or the Roman Triads_, down to the _Inspicientes_—not the means whereby this is to be created. He was a born foeman, one who loved battle for battle’s sake, who could never get enough of fighting,—a man with the blood of his Franconian ancestors coursing hotly through his veins. Like them, he loved freedom in all things—personal, intellectual, and religious. Like them, he scorned ease and luxury, and despised the burghers, with their love of comfort and wealth. He thought much more highly of the robber-knights than of the merchants they plundered. Germany, he believed, would come right if the merchants and the priests could be got rid of. The robbers were even German patriots who intercepted the introduction of foreign merchandise, and protected the German producers in securing the profits due to them for their labour.

Hutten is usually classed as an ally of Luther’s, and from the date of the Leipzig Disputation (1519), when Luther first attacked the Roman Primacy, he was an ardent admirer of the Reformer. But he had very little sympathy with the deeper religious side of the Reformation movement. He regarded Luther’s protest against Indulgences in very much the same way as did Pope Leo X. It was a contemptible monkish dispute, and all sensible men, he thought, ought to delight to see monks devour one another. “I lately said to a friar, who was telling me about it,” he writes, “ ‘Devour one another, that ye may be consumed one of another.’ It is my desire that our enemies (the monks) may live in as much discord as possible, and may be always quarrelling among themselves.” He attached himself vehemently to Luther (and Hutten was always vehement) only when he found that the monk stood for freedom of conscience (_The Liberty of a Christian Man_) and for a united Germany against Rome (_To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate_). As we study his face in the engravings which have survived, mark his hollow cheeks, high cheek-bones, long nose, heavy moustache, shaven chin, whiskers straggling as if frayed by the helmet, and bold eyes, we can see the rude Franconian noble, who by some strange freak of fortune became a scholar, a Humanist, a patriot, and, in his own way, a reformer.