Luther’s friendship with Spalatin, which dated from his Erfurt days, must also be taken into account in this regard. For Spalatin, who came as tutor and preacher in 1508 to the Court of the Elector of Saxony, was very closely allied in spirit with the Humanists of Erfurt and Gotha. It was he who asked Luther for his opinion respecting the famous dispute of the Cologne Faculty with the Humanist Reuchlin, a quarrel which engaged the sympathy of scholars and men of education throughout the length and breadth of Germany. Luther, in his reply, which dates from January or February, 1514, had at that time no hesitation in emphatically taking the side of Reuchlin, who, he declared, possessed his love and esteem. God, he says, would carry on His work in spite of the determined opposition of one thousand times one thousand Cologne burghers, and he adds meaningly that there were much more important matters with the Church which needed reform; they were “straining at gnats and swallowing camels.”[86] The conservative attitude of the authorities at Cologne was at that time not at all to his taste. Not long after Luther writes very strongly to Spalatin, again in favour of Reuchlin, against Ortwin de Graes of Cologne, and says among other things that he had hitherto thought the latter an ass, but that he must now call him a dog, a wolf and a crocodile, in spite of his wanting to play the lion,[87] expressions which are quite characteristic of Luther’s style. On the appearance of the “Letters of Obscure Men,” and a similar satirical writing which followed them, and which also found its way into Luther’s hands, the young Wittenberg professor, instead of taking the field against the evil tendency of these attacks of the Humanist party on the “bigots of Scholasticism and the cloister” as such diatribes deserved, and as he in his character of monk and theologian should have done, sought to take a middle course: he approved of the purpose of the attacks, but not of the satire itself, which mended nothing and contained too much invective. Both productions, he says, must have come out of the same pot; they had as their author, if not the same, at least a very similar comedian. It is now known that the real author of the letters which caused such an uproar was his former University friend, Crotus Rubeanus.[88]