Ulrich von Hutten[1] (21 April 1488 – 29 August 1523) was a German knight, scholar, poet and satirist, who later became a follower of Martin Luther and a Protestant reformer.

Fulda Abbey was home to the St Rabanus Maurus School, a highly regarded institution throughout Germany, and Hutten received an excellent education.

The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica reported that in 1508 he was a shipwrecked beggar on the Pomeranian coast, while the New International Encyclopedia described him as stricken down with the pestilence and recovering.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum was written in support of Hutten's mentor, the prominent theologian Johannes Reuchlin, who was engaged in a struggle to prevent the confiscation of Hebrew texts.

Epistolæ contained a series of fictitious letters, addressed to Hardwin von Grätz, that sarcastically attacked the scholastic theologians who were acting against Reuchlin.

While in Italy, Hutten conceived a fierce hatred for the papacy, which he bitterly attacked in his preface to an edition of Laurentius Valla's De Donatione Constantini, published in 1517.

In 1518, Hutten accompanied his patron, Archbishop Albert, on several official journeys to Paris and to the Diet of Augsburg, where Luther had his famous conference with Thomas Cajetan.

Subsequently, Hutten established a small printing press, and published pamphlets written in the German language attacking the Pope and the Roman clergy.

He wrote a text in 1519, De morbo Gallico (On the French disease),[7] about the symptoms of what is thought to be syphilis and its treatment with Guaiacum.

Other chief works include: Ars versificandi (The Art of Prosody, 1511); the Nemo (1518); the cited work on the Morbus Gallicus (1519); the volume of Steckelberg complaints against Duke Ulrich (including his four Ciceronian Orations, his Letters and the Phalarismus) also in 1519; the Vadismus (1520); and the controversy with Erasmus at the end of his life.