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Updated: June 7, 2025
But at last he was compelled to retire from the cities, and he took up his abode in the Castle of Ebernburg, with Franz von Sickingen. Franz von Sickingen was one of the great nobles of Germany, and he ruled over a region in the bend of the Rhine between Worms and Bingen. His was one of the bravest characters of that time.
Hutten also wrote now in German for the German people, both in prose and verse. During his stay with Sickingen in the winter at his Castle of Ebernburg, he read to him Luther's works, which roused in this powerful warrior an active sympathy with the doctrines of the Reformation, and stirred up projects in his mind, of what his own strong arm could accomplish for the good cause.
At this point, the German princes, lay as well as ecclesiastical, forgetting their religious predilections and mindful only of their common hatred of the knights, rushed to the defense of the bishop of Trier and drove off Sickingen, who, in April, 1523, died fighting before his own castle of Ebernburg. Ulrich von Hutten fled to Switzerland and perished miserably shortly afterwards.
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.
Consequently, a few days after the issue of the above manifesto, on August 27, 1522, Sickingen was able to start from the Castle of Ebernburg with an army of 5,000 foot and 1,500 knights, besides artillery, in the full confidence that he was about to destroy the position of the Palatine prince-prelate and raise himself without delay to the chief power on the Rhine.
Aleander was in danger of being murdered by the Lutheran populace, instigated thereto by Hutten's inflammatory letters from the neighbouring Castle of Ebernburg, in which Franz von Sickingen had given him a refuge.
He at once made his way back to Ebernburg, where he intended to pass the winter, since he saw that it was useless to continue the campaign, with his own army diminishing and the hoped-for supplies not appearing, whilst the forces of his antagonists augmented daily.
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