The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches

by David Starr Jordan

Now came the Great Diet at Worms, whither Luther was called before the Emperor to answer for his heretical teachings, and before which he stood firm and undaunted, a noble figure which has been a turning-point in history. "Here I stand. I can do nothing else. God help me."

Hutten, on his sick-bed at Ebernburg, not far away, was full of wrath at the trial of Luther. "Away!" he shouted, "away from the clear fountains, ye filthy swine! Out of the sanctuary, ye accursed peddlers! Touch no longer the altar with your desecrating hands. What have ye to do with the alms of our fathers, which were given for the poor and the Church, and you spend for splendor, pomp, and foolery, while the children suffer for bread? See you not that the wind of Freedom[2] is blowing? On two men not much depends. Know that there are many Luthers, many Huttens here. Should either of us be destroyed, still greater is the danger that awaits you; for then, with those battling for freedom, the avengers of innocence will make common cause."

I have wished, in writing this little sketch, that I could have a novelist's privilege of bringing out my hero happily at the end. I have hitherto had the struggles of a man living before his time to relate; the voice of one crying in the wilderness. If this were a romance, I might tell how, with Hutten's entreaties and Luther's exhortations, and under the wise management of Franz von Sickingen, the people banded together against foreign foes and foreign domination, and German unity, German freedom, and religious liberty were forever established in the Fatherland. But, alas! the history does not run in that way; at least not till a hundred years of war had bathed the land in blood.

For Hutten henceforth I have only misery and failure to relate. The union of knights and cities resulted in a ruinous campaign of Franz von Sickingen against Trèves. Sickingen's army was driven back by the Elector. His strong Castle of Landstühl was besieged by the Catholic princes, and cannon was used in this siege for the first time in history. The walls of Landstühl, twenty-five feet thick, were battered down, and Sickingen himself was killed by the falling of a beam. The war was over, and nothing worthy had been accomplished.

When Luther heard of the death of Sickingen, he wrote to a friend: "Yesterday I heard and read of Franz von Sickingen's true and sad history. God is a righteous but marvelous Judge. Sickingen's fall seems to me a verdict of the Lord, that strengthens me in the belief that the force of arms is to be kept far from matters of the Gospel."

Hutten was driven from the Ebernburg. He was offered a high place in the service of the King of France; but, as a true German, he refused it, and fled, penniless and sick, to Basle, in Switzerland.

Here the great Humanist, Erasmus, reigned supreme. Erasmus disavowed all sympathy with his former friend and fellow-student. He called Hutten a dangerous and turbulent man, and warned the Swiss against him. Erasmus had noticed, with horror, in those who had studied Greek, that the influence of Lutheranism was fatal to learning; that zeal for philology decreased as zeal for religion increased. Already Erasmus, like Reuchlin, was ranged on the side of the Pope. So, in letters and pamphlets, Erasmus attacked Hutten; and the poet was not slow in giving as good as he received. And this war between the Humanist and the Reformer gave great joy to the Obscurantists, who feared and hated them both.

"Humanism," says Strauss, "was broad-minded but faint-hearted, and in none is this better seen than in Erasmus. Luther was a narrower man, but his unvarying purpose, never looking to left nor right, was his strength. Humanism is the broad mirror-like Rhine at Bingen. It must grow narrower and wilder before it can break through the mountains to the sea."

Repulsed by Erasmus at Basle, Hutten fled to Mülhausen. Attacked by assassins there, he left at midnight for Zürich, where he put himself under the protection of Ulrich Zwingli. In Zwingli, the purest, loftiest, and clearest of insight of all of the leaders of the Reformation, Hutten found a congenial spirit. His health was now utterly broken. To the famous Baths of Pfaffers he went, in hope of release from pain. But the modern bath-houses of Ragatz were not built in those days, and the daily descent by a rope from above into the dark and dismal chasm was too much for his feeble strength. Then Zwingli sent him to a kindly friend, the Pastor Hans Schnegg, who lived on the little Island of Ufnau, in the Lake of Zürich. And here at Ufnau, worn out by his long, double conflict with the Pope and with disease, Ulrich von Hutten died in 1523, at the age of thirty-five. "He left behind him," wrote Zwingli, "nothing of worth. Books he had none; no money, and no property of any sort, except a pen."