Of the foreign ‘nations’ at the universities of Italy none was more numerous than the German, a title which embraced many nationalities of the North:  not merely German-speaking races such as the Swiss and Flemish and Dutch, but all who could by any stretch of imagination be represented as descendants of the Goths; Swedes and Danes, Hungarians and Bohemians, Lithuanians and Bulgars and Poles.  That they went in such numbers is not surprising.  The prestige of Italian teaching was great and well-established, whereas their own universities were few and scarcely more than nascent; indeed, when the Council of Vienne had ordained the teaching of Greek and other missionary languages in 1311, its injunctions went to France and Italy and England and Spain:  but Germany had no university to which a missive could be directed.  From Southern Germany, too, and Switzerland and Austria, the distance was small, notwithstanding the obvious Alps and the difficulties of the passes.  Even Celtis, in spite of his denunciations, sent on his best pupils to Italy.  So there were many who brought home with them to the North recollections of lofty condescension and of ill-disguised contempt for the foreigner:  insults that they burned to repay.

Italy might vaunt the glories of ancient Rome; but Germany also had deeds to be proud of.  Rome might have founded the World-empire; but Charlemagne had conquered the dominions of the Caesars and made the Empire Germanic.  Classic antiquity, too, could not be denied to the land and people whom Tacitus had described; and Germans were not slow to claim the virtues found among them by the Roman historian.  Arminius became the national hero.  German faith and honour, German simplicity, German sincerity and candour—­these are insisted upon by the Transalpine humanists with a vehemence which suggests that while priding themselves on the possession of such qualities, they marked the lack of them in others.  We may recall Ascham’s horror of the Englishman Italianated.  Not that Germans could not make friends in Italy.  Scheurl loved his time at Bologna, and was eager to fight for the Bentivogli against Julius II.  Erasmus was made much of by the Aldine Academy at Venice; and ten years later Hutten was charmed with his reception there.  But with many, conscious of their own defects[40] and of the reality of Italian superiority, the charge of barbarism must have rankled.  To Luther in 1518 Italian is synonymous with supercilious.

     [40] Thus a worthy abbot in the Inn valley, writing to Erasmus
          in 1523, manages to achieve a Latin letter, but apologizes
          for only being able to write in German characters.