Ulrich was the eldest son, and bore his father's name. But he was not the son his father had dreamed of. Slender of figure, short of stature, and weak of limb, Ulrich seemed unworthy of his burly ancestry. The horse, the sword, and the lute were not for him. He tried hard to master them and to succeed in all things worthy of a knight. But he was strong only with his books. At last to his books his father consigned him, and, sorely disappointed, he sent Ulrich to the monastery of Fulda to be made a priest.
A wise man, Eitelwolf von Stein, became his friend, and pointed out to him a life braver than that of a priest, more noble than that of a knight, the life of a scholar. To Hutten's father Eitelwolf wrote: "Would you bury a genius like that in the cloister? He must be a man of letters." But the father had decided once for all. Ulrich must never return to Steckelberg unless he came back as a priest. And the son took his fate in his own hands, and fled from Fulda, to make his way as a scholar in a world in which scholarship received scanty recognition.
At the same time another young man whose history was to be interwoven with his own, Martin Luther, fled from the wickedness and deceit of this same world to the solitude of the monastery of Erfurth. By very different paths they came at last to work in the same cause, and their modes of action were not less different.
To the University of Cologne Hutten went, and with the students of that day he was trained in the mysteries of scholasticism, and in the Latin of the schoolmen and the priests. Wonderful problems they pondered over, and they used to write long arguments in Latin for or against propositions which came nowhere within the domain of fact. That scholarship stood related to reality, and that it must find its end and justification in action was no part of the philosophy of those times.
But Hutten and his friends cared little for scholastic puzzles and they gave themselves to the study of the beauties of Latin poetry and to the newly opened mine of the literature of Greece. They delighted in Virgil and Lucian, and still more in Homer and Aeschylus.
The Turks had conquered Constantinople, and the fall of the Greek Empire had driven many learned Greeks to the West of Europe. There some of the scholars received them with open arms, and eagerly learned from them to read Homer and Aristotle in the original tongue, and the New Testament also. Those who followed these studies came to be known as Humanists. But most of the universities and the monasteries in Germany looked upon this revival of Greek culture as pernicious and antichristian. Poetry they despised. The Latin Vulgate met their religious needs, and Greek was only another name for Paganism. The party name of Obscurantists ("Dunkelmänner") was given to these, and this name has remained with them on the records of history.