The University,
thanks to which the name of Salamanca was honourably known throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries from Lisbon to Novgorod, was founded by Alfonso IX., King of Leon, in the first quarter of the thirteenth century—moved thereto, it is said, by the establishment of the university of Palencia by his cousin of Castile. Consequent on the union of the two kingdoms in the person of Fernando III., the latter university declined and faded out of existence, Salamanca thus remaining the oldest seat of learning in Spain. Valladolid, the next in order of antiquity, dates from 1346, Alcalá from 1499, Seville from 1504. The sainted king in 1243 bestowed a charter on the young university, by virtue of which the students were exempted from the municipal law and made subject to their own tribunals. The first court thus constituted was composed of the bishop, the dean and prior of the Friars Preachers, the father guardian of the Discalced Franciscans, and certain persons named as Don Rodrigo, and Pedro Guigelmo, Garcia Gomez, Pedro Vellido, Fernando Sanchez de Porto Carrero, Pedro Muñiz, canon of Leon, and Miguel Perez, canon of Lamego.
Under Alfonso the Learned the new foundation naturally flourished. He not only confirmed by a royal ordinance, dated from Badajoz, 1252, all the privileges granted by his predecessors, but exempted the students from tolls and certain other dues, and secured them priority in the matter of accommodation at inns. Furthermore, in 1254, he endowed a chair of law with an annual stipend of five hundred maravedis, an assistant or bachelor also being appointed; a master of decrees, at a salary of three hundred maravedis; two masters of decretals, at five hundred maravedis a year each; two masters in physics, in logic, and in grammar, each at two hundred maravedis; an organist at fifty maravedis; and a librarian, at a hundred maravedis. The same monarch reduced the number of rectors to two—the Dean of Salamanca and one Arnal Sanz. In the celebrated Partidas, in the compilation of which Alfonso was doubtless assisted by members of this university, directions are given that at all such seats of learning there should be good inns, abundance of bread and wine, and pleasant walks where the students might in the evenings take the air.
No mention is made in the decrees of 1252 and 1254 of a faculty of theology, which probably came within the province of the cathedral chapter. The connection between the university and the cathedral was very intimate. Examinations were held and degrees conferred, as we have seen, in the chapel of Santa Barbara; the doctors were admitted to the choir, the canons reciprocally to the university theatres. Pope Innocent IV. had referred in flattering terms to the university at the Council of Lyons in 1245; and in 1255 Alexander IV., in a brief dated from Naples, acclaimed it as one of the four wonders of the world, and gave it his pontifical sanction. Boniface VIII. sent the professors a copy of his decretals, and revised the university statutes. The students were divided into eight sections, according to the part of the Peninsula from which they came, and the heads of these sections elected the rector. The election took place at Martinmas, and the installation on St. Catharine’s Day. The newly elected dignitary was escorted to his house by the students, each section being marshalled behind an ensign consisting of the principal fruit of its country. The rivalries between these different groups generally led to blows, and frequently called for the intervention of the authorities. On such occasions it was the privilege of the rector to defray all damages and fines. But the reign of cakes and ale did not always endure at Salamanca. In 1308 the times were so bad that the stipends of the professors were suppressed, and the university only survived the crisis through the self-sacrifice of the chapter and the intervention of the pope, who devoted a ninth of the tithes of the archbishopric of Santiago to its maintenance.
Subsequent pontiffs continued to exhibit great interest in the now flourishing institution, and to it belonged the honour of terminating, by its decision in favour of Clement VI., the schism which had divided the Christian church. A less honourable incident was the unfavourable decision pronounced by its professors on the great project of Columbus, referred to them by Queen Isabel. This verdict was the more surprising as the university had adopted the Copernican system at a time when it was considered heretical and dangerous.
The most famous school in all Spain shared the fortunes of the monarchy. In the days of Luis de Leon there were 70 professors and 10,000 students, and the 52 printing-offices and 84 bookshops employed 3600 men. In the year 1552 there were still no fewer than 6328 undergraduates. Women competed equally with men for the honours of the learned. Among the most illustrious members of the university were Beatriz Galendo, surnamed the Latin, the daughter of a professor, and the teacher and friend of Isabel the Catholic; Alvara de Alba, the author of a mathematical treatise, and Cecilia Morillas, the wife of a Portuguese, Dom Antonio Sobrino, and the mother of several learned doctors, who consulted her on the most difficult points in the humanities, in philosophy, and theology. Salamanca remained to the last a stronghold of Catholic orthodoxy. The only one of its professors who ever advanced heretical opinions—Pedro de Osuna—recanted in good time, and assisted with the rest of the university at the solemn burning of his books and the purification of the class-rooms in which he had taught. At the end of the eighteenth century the number of students had fallen to 2000. To-day it may be estimated at 1200 students, all drawn (excepting those of the Irish college) from the surrounding provinces. The nineteen professors are worse paid than an English ledger-clerk, and no book or pamphlet has issued from the university press (if such exists) for many years past.
The colleges were classified as Escuelas Mayores and Escuelas Menores. The college to which the name university is specially applied seems to have been built between 1415 and 1433 by Alfonso Rodriguez Carpintero, though the shield of the anti-pope Benedict XIII. (Pedro de Luna) over the door leading to the cathedral, dating from about 1380, leads one to suppose that part of the building was already standing at that date. For a long time, however, the cloisters of the cathedral were used as class-rooms. The present edifice has little about it to suggest the Gothic era. Restored by Fernando and Isabel, it ranks indeed as one of the earliest and finest specimens of plateresque architecture. Over the double entrance of the main façade are two rudely executed busts of the Catholic sovereigns, clasping the same sceptre, and enclosed in one medallion. Around this is inscribed the legend: ‘οί βασιλεῖς τῇ ἐγκυκλοπαιδείᾳ, αὕτη βασιλεῦσί’ (‘the Kings to the University, the University to the Kings’). The panels into which the three stages of this beautiful façade are divided are filled with escutcheons, medallions, foliage, scrolls, and grotesques, all admirably executed in the creamy stone, which gives so beautiful an appearance to the buildings of Salamanca. This fine work is ascribed to Enrique de Egas, and said to have cost 30,000 ducats. It is surmounted by a parapet of elaborate pierced work, and two pinnacles, which we could perhaps have spared.
Opposite, in the courtyard, stands the fine bronze statue of the university’s most brilliant alumnus—Luis de Leon. This great man was born at Granada in 1527, and entered the Augustinian Order in 1544. His writings went far to give permanency and purity to the Castilian idiom, which only at that time was coming into use by the learned. Promoted to the chair of theology at Salamanca, his translation into the vernacular of the Song of Solomon excited the suspicions of the Holy Office. He was arrested and kept in confinement at Valladolid during five years, at the end of which time he was released, the charges against him not having been proved to the satisfaction even of the inquisitors. On his return to his chair he received a tumultuous ovation. As he rose, the crowd of students awaited in dead silence an apology, a condemnation of his unjust accusers, some reference at least to the prosecution which had dragged on through five weary years. They were disappointed. Leon had no mind to dwell on his personal affairs. He broke the silence of five years with the simple words, ‘As we were saying yesterday ...’ He died, Provincial of his order, in the year 1591, and was buried in the Convent of San Agustino at Salamanca.
On the left side of the square is the old students’ hospital, with a fine effigy of St. Thomas Aquinas over the doorway, and a cornice in the plateresque style. Finer still is the portal of the adjacent Escuelas Menores, also dating from the early sixteenth century. Above the doorway of two arches are displayed the three escutcheons which proclaim the university to be royal, and the triple crown and the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul which proclaim it pontifical. These emblems appear amidst a profusion of detail, in which the Gothic and plateresque styles seem to have been assimilated.
Returning to the principal façade, we find the archives on the ground floor. Opening out of the inner patio may be seen the lecture-room of Louis de Leon. His ashes now repose in the chapel once adorned by Fernando Gallego, but ‘restored’ in the eighteenth century. The coloured stones and marbles used in the reconstruction are not without a certain pleasing effect. Passing up the noble staircase, with its banisters formed of dancing figures and foliage and superb artesonado ceiling, we reach the handsome library. This contains many treasures, among them forty Greek codices, as many Latin, the illuminated MS. of ‘famous and virtuous women,’ written by Alvaro de Luna, and a fifteenth-century Bible, richly illuminated. The Sala del Claustro is shown, outside which the student about to contest a thesis was obliged to remain for twenty-four hours to consider his subject at leisure.