He seized the present opportunity to quarrel with Hutten; and to Hutten's somewhat bitter attacks on him in consequence he replied with ferocity in his _Spongia Erasmi adversus aspergines Hutteni_.
Hutten had had to fly from Basel to Muelhausen and thence to Zuerich, in the last stages of syphilitic disease.

He was kindly received by the reformer, Zwingli of Zuerich, who advised him to try the waters of Pfeffers, and gave him letters of recommendation to the abbot of that place.

He returned, in no wise benefited, to Zuerich, when Zwingli again befriended the sick knight, and sent him to a friend of his, the "reformed" pastor of the little island of "Ufenau," at the other end of the lake, where after a few weeks' suffering he died in abject destitution, leaving, it is said, nothing behind him but his pen.

The disease from which Hutten suffered the greater part of his life, at that time a comparatively new importation and much more formidable even than nowadays, may well have contributed to an irascibility of temper and to a certain recklessness which the typical free-lance of the Reformation in its early period exhibited.

Hutten was never a theologian, and the Reformation seems to have attracted him mainly from its political side as implying the assertion of the dawning feeling of German nationality as against the hated enemies of freedom of thought and the new light, the clerical satellites of the Roman see.