It is probable that his sojourn in Italy did as much for him as for Luther, though in a different way. The Reformer turned with loathing from Italian, and especially from Roman wickedness. The Humanist meditated on the greatness of the imperial idea, now, he thought, the birthright of his Germany, which was being robbed of it by the Papacy. Henceforward he was dominated by one persistent thought. He was a Humanist and a poet, but a man apart, marked out from among his fellows, destined to live in the memories of his nation when their names had been forgotten. They might be better scholars, able to write a finer Latinity, and pen trifles more elegantly; but he was a man with a purpose. His erratic and by no means pure life was ennobled by his sincere, if limited and unpractical, patriotism. He wrought, schemed, fought, flattered, and apostrophised to create a united Germany under a reformed Emperor. Whatever hindered this was to be attacked with what weapons of sarcasm, invective, and scorn were at his command; and the _one_ enemy was the Papacy of the close of the fifteenth century, and all that it implied. It was the Papacy that drained Germany of gold, that kept the Emperor in thraldom, that set one portion of the land against the other, that gave the separatist designs of the princes their promise of success. The Papacy was his Carthage, which must be destroyed. Hutten was a master of invective, fearless, critically destructive; but he had small constructive faculty. It is not easy to discover what he meant by a reformation of the Empire—something loomed before him vague, grand, a renewal of an imagined past. Germany might be great, it is suggested in the _Inspicientes_ (written in 1520), if the Papacy were defied, if the princes were kept in their proper place of subordination, if a great imperial army were created and paid out of a common imperial fund,—an army where the officers were the knights, and the privates a peasant infantry (_landsknechts_). It is the passion for a German Imperial Unity which we find in all Hutten’s writings, from the early _Epistola ad Maximilianum Cæsarem Italiæ fictitia_, the _Vadiscus, or the Roman Triads_, down to the _Inspicientes_—not the means whereby this is to be created. He was a born foeman, one who loved battle for battle’s sake, who could never get enough of fighting,—a man with the blood of his Franconian ancestors coursing hotly through his veins. Like them, he loved freedom in all things—personal, intellectual, and religious. Like them, he scorned ease and luxury, and despised the burghers, with their love of comfort and wealth. He thought much more highly of the robber-knights than of the merchants they plundered. Germany, he believed, would come right if the merchants and the priests could be got rid of. The robbers were even German patriots who intercepted the introduction of foreign merchandise, and protected the German producers in securing the profits due to them for their labour.