Hutten, ULRICH VON, poet, humanist, and reformer, was born on 21st April 1488, of an old Franconian family whose seat was at Steckelberg, near Fulda. Being puny and small of stature, and of weak health, he was destined, although the eldest son, for the tonsure, and was sent in 1499 to the Benedictine monastery of Fulda. But his temperament—proud, high-spirited, impetuous, impatient of contradiction and of restraint—did not fit him for leading the religious life, and in 1504 or 1505 he fled away from the monastery. Consumed with a devouring hunger for knowledge, especially for the new Humanistic learning, Hutten visited the chief universities of northern Germany, and finally passed by way of Vienna into Italy (1512). During these years he was often utterly destitute, and generally ill, sustained only by his love for the New Learning and his indomitable spirit. His first works—Latin poems—were printed in 1509; and in the same year he wrote the first of his many bitter satires. From this time onwards his pen never rested; when not employed in behalf of the great cause it was busy in some private feud or quarrel. In Italy Hutten remained nearly two years. On reaching home he was received with distinction at the court of Albert, Archbishop and Elector of Mainz. There he first became acquainted with Erasmus, the leader of the Humanistic movement. In the spring of 1515 all the fiery combativeness of Hutten's nature was roused by the murder of his cousin Hans, who had been wantonly slain by Ulrich, Duke of Württemberg. The young poet launched denunciation after denunciation at the guilty duke, and called upon the emperor to punish the offender; and, himself girding the sword upon his thigh, he marched into Württemberg along with the army of vengeance his family had raised. His friends then sent him back to Italy to study law. At Rome and at Bologna he spent nearly two years, and came home to enter the service of the Archbishop of Mainz. It was at this time that he wrote his most important work, his share of the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum (q.v.).
Having been formally crowned poet-laureate of Germany by the Emperor Maximilian at Augsburg in 1517, Hutten began the real work of his life, his deliberate assault upon papal aggressiveness, in an ironical dedication to Leo X. of a new edition of Laurentius Valla's exposure of the fictitious Donation of Constantine. When he first heard of Luther's revolt, Hutten looked upon it as a mere monks' quarrel. In 1519 he took part, along with his subsequent friend and patron, Franz von Sickingen, in the campaign of the Swabian League against his old enemy, Duke Ulrich of Württemberg. But this concluded, he returned to the attack upon the papal power. The ideal that possessed his soul was to create a national Germany, delivered from the hateful interference, extortion, and spiritual tyranny of supercilious priests from beyond the Alps. But he also aimed at an intellectual reform of the so-called learned classes, through the spread of the New Learning, and at the cultivation of refinement in the habits and manners of his countrymen. At length he came to understand the real significance of Luther's action, and, at once joining hands with him, he espoused the reformer's part with his customary impetuosity and vehemence. Henceforward he was more closely identified with the Reformation than with the Humanistic movement. A set of dialogues which he published in 1520 contained Vadiscus, his formal manifesto against Rome. This at last stung the pope to take retributive measures, and he caused the archbishop to dismiss Hutten from his service. Hutten found shelter in Sickingen's strong castle of Ebernburg in the Palatinate, whence during the next two years he discharged a perfect shower of invectives, denunciations, and satires at the heads of the Romanists, and wrote appeal after appeal to the German emperor, the princes and nobles, bishops, scholars, and people, urging them to shake off the tyrannous domination of the enemies of their country. And in order to get at the common people he began to write in the vernacular, his earliest work in German being Aufwecker der deutschen Nation (1520), a poem in which Hutten's satiric powers reach their highest pitch. Sickingen's castle having become unsafe, Hutten fled in 1522 to Basel, where he was greeted with marked coldness by Erasmus. This estrangement shortly afterwards gave rise to a bitter epistolary quarrel. At Basel Hutten was again attacked by the odious disease from which he had suffered since boyhood; and, after seeking a safe retreat at Mühlhausen and at Zurich, was befriended by Zwingli, who found him an asylum on the little island of Ufnau in the Lake of Zurich. There Hutten ended his stormy life in 1523.
His writings fall into three divisions: (1) Latin poems (1509–16); (2) letters and orations (1515–17); and (3) dialogues and letters, including his German writings (1517–23). See his Opera Omnia (7 vols. 1859–62), and lives of him by Strauss (4th ed. 1878; trans. by Sturge, 1874), Schott (1890), and others.