Hutten is usually classed as an ally of Luther’s, and from the date of the Leipzig Disputation (1519), when Luther first attacked the Roman Primacy, he was an ardent admirer of the Reformer. But he had very little sympathy with the deeper religious side of the Reformation movement. He regarded Luther’s protest against Indulgences in very much the same way as did Pope Leo X. It was a contemptible monkish dispute, and all sensible men, he thought, ought to delight to see monks devour one another. “I lately said to a friar, who was telling me about it,” he writes, “ ‘Devour one another, that ye may be consumed one of another.’ It is my desire that our enemies (the monks) may live in as much discord as possible, and may be always quarrelling among themselves.” He attached himself vehemently to Luther (and Hutten was always vehement) only when he found that the monk stood for freedom of conscience (_The Liberty of a Christian Man_) and for a united Germany against Rome (_To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate_). As we study his face in the engravings which have survived, mark his hollow cheeks, high cheek-bones, long nose, heavy moustache, shaven chin, whiskers straggling as if frayed by the helmet, and bold eyes, we can see the rude Franconian noble, who by some strange freak of fortune became a scholar, a Humanist, a patriot, and, in his own way, a reformer. Chapter IV. Social Conditions.(47) § 1. Towns and Trade. It has been already said that the times of the Renaissance were a period of transition in the social as well as in the intellectual condition of the peoples of Europe. The economic changes were so great, that no description of the environment of the Reformation would be complete without some account of the social revolution which was slowly progressing. It must be remembered, however, that there is some danger in making the merely general statements which alone are possible in this chapter. The economic forces at work were modified and changed in countries and in districts, and during decades, by local conditions. Any general description is liable to be qualified by numerous exceptions.