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Crotus, meanwhile, after his interview with Hutten at Bamberg, advised Luther not to despise the kindness of Sickingen, the great leader of the German nobility. It was rumoured that Luther, if driven from Wittenberg, would take refuge among the Bohemians. Crotus earnestly warned him against doing so.
Hutten at the same time proceeded to launch the most violent controversial diatribes and satires against Rome; one in particular, called 'The Roman Trinity, wherein he detailed in striking triplets the long series of Romish pretensions, trickeries, and vexatious abuses. At Easter he held a personal interview at Bamberg with Crotus, on his return from Italy.
Instances of this were found in his old friend Crotus, who had now entered the service of Cardinal Albert, and as his 'plate-licker, as Luther called him, abused the Reformation; and in the theologian George Witzel, a pupil of Erasmus and student at Wittenberg, who formerly had been suspected even of sympathising with the peasants in their rebellion, and of rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity, but who now wished for a Reformation after Erasmus' ideas, and was one of the foremost literary opponents of the Lutheran Reformation.
He had made himself, Crotus adds, a name among his companions as the 'learned philosopher' and the 'musician, but he never belonged to the 'poets, which was the favourite title of the young Humanists.
Crotus was able to remind him in after life how, in close intimacy, they had studied the fine arts together at the university. But there is no mention of him in the numerous letters and poems left to posterity by the aspiring Humanists at Erfurt.
It was he who, towards the end of 1519, sent from Italy to Luther and Melancthon at Wittenberg, the Humanist theologian, John Hess, afterwards the reformer of the Church at Breslau. Crotus himself returned in the spring of 1520 to Germany.
Crotus expressed to him the infinite pleasure it was to see him, the great champion of the faith; whereupon Luther answered, that he did not deserve such praise, but he thanked them for their love. The poet Eoban also stammered out, as he said of himself, a few words; he afterwards described the progress in a set of Latin songs. The following day, a Sunday, Luther spent at Erfurt.
Against them and against the Dominican Order in particular, Sickingen now declared his open enmity, and his sympathy with the 'good old doctor Reuchlin. In spite of delay and resistance, they were forced to pay the sum demanded. Meanwhile, no doubt under the influence of his friend Crotus, Hutten's eyes were opened about the monk Luther.
The large majority of the university there were by this time full of enthusiasm for his cause. His friend Crotus, on his return from Italy, had been chosen Rector. The ban of excommunication had not been published by the university, and had been thrown into the water by the students. Justus Jonas was foremost in zeal; and even Erasmus, his honoured friend, had no longer been able to restrain him.
Here these Humanist friends of the Lutheran movement had already been joined by Crotus' personal friend, Ulrich von Hutten, who not only could wield his pen with more vigour and acuteness than almost all his associates, but who declared himself ready to take up the sword for the cause he defended, and to call in powerful allies of his own class to the fight.
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