Plays, Jests and a Satirical Age
Before Luther there was no star of the first magnitude in the sky of German letters; there was only a remarkable ferment and fertility. Poetry was written to be read aloud and was therefore welcomed in castles and cottages alike. Mystery plays and Passion plays continued to be performed, and covered the people's rough piety with their keen appetite for the stage. By 1450 the popular German plays had become wholly worldly and secular. Even in the course of religious plays, crude and sometimes indecent comic farces crept in. The jest flourished in literature; the pranks and uproar of Till Eulenspiegel, that wandering conjurer, raised a cry of delight across Germany, and his merry jokes spared neither the learned nor the common; in 1515 his adventures were printed. As time passed, literature, like art, once more pictured monks and priests on their way to hell. Satire seeped into every form of writing.
The Ship of Fools
The most effective satire of the age was Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools (1494). No one expected so lively and delightful a masterpiece from a professor of law and classical literature at the University of Basel. Brant pictured a fleet (in the course of the voyage he forgot the fleet and called it a ship) whose passengers are all fools who want to cross the sea of life. One fool after another steps onto the stage; class after class takes the lash of the satirical jests of this jury. No one is safe from the sting of his tongue: farmer and beggar, gambler and miser, usurer and astrologer, the pretentious lawyer and the show-off, the philosopher and the priest; neither the pride of the ambitious, nor the laziness of students, nor the money-love of merchants, nor the dishonesty of craftsmen. Brant respects only the faithful, pious Catholic who lives so as to earn heaven. The book, beautifully printed and adorned with woodcuts that sharpened the sting of the stories, reached several languages and all of western Europe; after the Bible, the Ship of Fools was the best seller of the age.
Murner: A Sharper Lash
Brant laid his satirical lashes on the clergy gently, but Thomas Murner, a Franciscan friar, made monks, priests, bishops and nuns the target of satire sharper, coarser and shrewder than Brant's. Murner says that the priest is attracted by money more than by religion; he milks the people with a thousand flatteries and then passes part of his spoils to the bishop above him, who in return lets him keep a concubine; and that nuns carry on secret love affairs and rise to be abbesses without having more children than the rest. (The book's sexual allegations are only summarized here.) But Murner, like Brant, was a loyal supporter of staying with the Church; he reproached Luther and counted him a fool among fools, and in a pathetic poem entitled On the Decay of the Christian Faith he lamented the decline of Christianity and the chaos of the religious world.
Hutten's Early Life
If the great popularity of these satires was a sign of the blame that even faithful Catholics loyal to the Church heaped on their clergy, the fiercer satires of Ulrich von Hutten put an end to any hope that the Church would reform itself, and openly called the people to revolution. Ulrich was born into a family of knights in Franconia; at eleven he was sent to the monastery at Fulda, with the expectation that he would become a monk. After six years of novitiate and trial he fled (1505) and took up the wandering life of a poor student; he wrote and recited poetry, lived by begging, and was often without shelter or home. His small frame was wasted by fever; his left leg was often disabled by sores and swelling; his character took on the sharpness and irritability of an invalid, though Eobanus Hessus considered him "on the whole lovable." (The book adds a reference to his early love life, which is omitted here.)
A kindly bishop took him to Vienna, where the humanists welcomed him; he fell out with them and went off to Italy. He studied at Pavia and Bologna, wrote venomous satires against Pope Julius II, joined a German invading army to feed himself, and then, always accompanied by pain and suffering, returned to Germany.
Mainz, Erasmus and the Letter from Rome
At Mainz fortune smiled on him briefly: he wrote an ode in praise of Albrecht, the young archbishop, and received 200 gulden ($5,000 by the book's conversion) as a reward. Albrecht's court was at this time a gathering place of humanists, many of them bold and fearless freethinkers. It was there that Ulrich von Hutten helped to write the Letters of Obscure Men; he met Erasmus and was charmed by that great scholar's learning, intelligence and sweet speech. With the help of Albrecht's gulden and the aid of his kind and merciful father he went again beneath the sun of Italy, and wherever he stopped he ruined the reputation of the "hypocritical and corrupt breed of monks and theologians." From the seat of the papacy he sent a letter of warning to Crotus Rubeanus. In substance he wrote: my friend, close your eyes to the sight of Rome; what you seek can no longer be found here. You can live by plundering others, commit crime and insult sacred things; you can give yourself to lust, deny God and heaven; yes, if you do all this but bring money to Rome, you are the most respectable of men. Here they sell virtue and heavenly blessings; you can even buy pardon for your future sins; and thus to be good and honest is nothing but folly. (The book's passage is abridged here.)
The Donation of Constantine
With mischievous irony he presented to Leo X a new edition of Lorenzo Valla's destructive treatise on the forged "Donation of Constantine" (1517) and assured the pope that his predecessors had all been tyrants, thieves and usurpers who had made the punishments and rewards of the other world a means of heaping up wealth and gaining income. The book fell into Luther's hands and fanned his anger against the popes and their system of rule.
Despite the harshness and reproach in many of Hutten's poems, they brought him scattered fame in Germany. In 1517 he returned home. At Nuremberg Konrad Peutinger entertained him, and at the suggestion of this learned and wealthy scholar Maximilian honored Hutten with the title of poet laureate. Meanwhile Albrecht employed him in political service and gave him important and distant missions such as one to Paris.
The Ride to Augsburg
When Ulrich von Hutten returned to Mainz (1518), he found Germany stirred up and inflamed by Luther's objections to the sale of indulgences; and perhaps a smile came to his lips at finding his comfortable master drawn awkwardly into the affair. Luther was summoned to Augsburg to face Cardinal Cajetan on a charge of heresy. Hutten hesitated; emotionally and financially he was tied firmly to the archbishop, but he heard in his blood a voice calling him to battle. So he mounted his horse and rode to Augsburg.