The men who followed the new knowledge had slight regard for ties of home, and travelled eagerly in search of learning. So, even as from far and wide those who could study Roman law came to Bologna, the study of theology and all that philosophy included drew men to Paris. Thither came the keen-minded from Italy and from England; from the Low Countries and from Germany; and from the many very different regions now covered by the name of France. Wherever born and of whatever race, the devotees of philosophy and theology at some period of their career reached Paris, learned and taught there, and were affected by the universalizing influence of an international aggregate of scholarship. So had it been with Breton Abaelard, with German Hugo, and with Lombard Peter; so with English John, hight of Salisbury. And in the following times of culmination, Albertus Magnus comes in his maturity from Germany; and his marvellous pupil Thomas, born of noble Norman stock in southern Italy, follows his master, eventually to Paris. So Bonaventura of lowly mid-Italian birth likewise learns and teaches there; and that unique Englishman, Roger Bacon, and after him Duns Scotus. These few greatest names symbolize the centralizing of thought in the crowded and huddled lecture-rooms of the City on the Seine.
The origins of the great mediaeval Universities can scarcely be accommodated to simple statement. Their history is frequently obscure, and always intricate; and the selection of a specific date or factor as determining the inception, or distinctive development, of these mediaeval creations is likely to be but arbitrary. They had no antique prototype: nothing either in Athens or Rome ever resembled these corporations of masters and students, with their authoritative privileges, their fixed curriculum, and their grades of formally certified attainment. Even the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, with all the pedantry of its learned litterateurs and their minute study of the past, has nothing to offer like the scholastic obsequiousness of the mediaeval University, which sought to set upon one throne the antique philosophy and the Christian revelation, that it might with one and the same genuflection bow down before them both. It behoves us to advert to the conditions influencing the growth of Universities, and give a little space to those which were chief among them.
The energetic human advance distinguishing the twelfth century in western Europe exhibits among its most obvious phenomena an increased mobility in all classes of society, and a tendency to gather into larger communities and form strong corporate associations for profit or protection. New towns came into being, and old ones grew apace. Some of them in the north of Europe wrested their freedom from feudal lords; and both in the north and south, municipalities attained a more complex organization, while within them groups of men with common interests formed themselves into powerful guilds. As strangers of all kinds—merchants, craftsmen, students—came and went, their need of protection became pressing, and was met in various ways.
No kind of men were more quickly touched by the new mobility than the thousands of youthful learners who desired to extend their knowledge, or, in some definite field, perfect their education. In the eleventh century, such would commonly have sought a monastery, near or far. In the twelfth and then in the thirteenth, they followed the human currents to the cities, where knowledge flourished as well as trade, and tolerable accommodation might be had for teachers and students. Certain towns, some for more, some for less, obvious reasons, became homes of study. Bologna, Paris, Oxford are the chief examples. Irnerius, famed as the founder of the systematic study of the Roman law, and Gratian, the equally famous orderer of the Canon law, taught or wrote at Bologna when the twelfth century was young. Their fame drew crowds of laymen and ecclesiastics, who desired to equip themselves for advancement through the business of the law, civil or ecclesiastical. At the same time, hundreds, which grew to thousands, were attracted to the Paris schools—the school of Notre Dame, where William of Champeaux held forth; the school of St. Victor, where he afterwards established himself, and where Hugo taught; and the school of St. Geneviève, where Abaelard lectured on dialectic and theology. These were palpable gatherings together of material for a University. What first brought masters and students to Oxford a few decades later is not so clear. But Oxford had been an important town long before a University lodged itself there.
In the twelfth century, citizenship scarcely protected one beyond the city walls. A man carried but little safety with him. Only an insignificant fraction of the students at Bologna, and of both masters and students at Paris and Oxford, were citizens of those towns. The rest had come from everywhere. Paris and Bologna held an utterly cosmopolitan, international, concourse of scholar-folk. And these scholars, turbulent enough themselves, and dwelling in a turbulent foreign city, needed affiliation there, and protection and support. Organization was an obvious necessity, and if possible the erection of a civitas within a civitas, a University within a none too friendly town. This was the primal situation, and the primal need. Through somewhat different processes, and under different circumstances, these exigencies evoked a University in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford.[523]
In Italy, where the instincts of ancient Rome never were extinguished, where some urban life maintained itself through the early helpless mediaeval centuries, where during the same period an infantile humanism did not cease to stammer; where “grammar” was studied and taught by laymen, and the “ars dictaminis” practised men in the forms of legal instruments, it was but natural that the new intellectual energies of the twelfth century should address themselves to the study of the Roman law, which, although debased and barbarized, had never passed into desuetude. And inasmuch as abstract theology did not attract the Italian temperament or meet the conditions of papal politics in Italy, it was likewise natural that ecclesiastical energies should be directed to the equally useful and closely related canon law. Such studies with their practical ends could best be prosecuted at some civic centre. In the first part of the twelfth century, Irnerius lectured at Bologna upon the civil law; a generation later, Gratian published his Decretum there. The specific reasons inducing the former to open his lectures in that city are not known; but a large and thrifty town set at the meeting of the great roads from central Italy to the north and east, was an admirable place for a civil doctor and his audience, as the event proved. Gratian was a monk in a Bologna convent, and may have listened to Irnerius. The publication of his Decretum from Bologna, by that time (cir. 1142) famous for jurisprudence, lent authority to this work, whose universal recognition was to enhance in turn Bologna’s reputation.
From the time of this inception of juristic studies, the talents of the doctors, and the city’s fame, drew a prodigious concourse of students from all the lands of western Europe. The Doctors of the Civil and Canon Laws organized themselves into one, and subsequently into two, Colleges. Apparently they had become an efficient association by the third quarter of the twelfth century. But the University of Bologna was to be constituted par excellence, not of one or more colleges of doctors, but of societies of students. The persons who came for legal instruction were not boys getting their first education in the Arts. They were men studying a profession, and among them were many individuals of wealth and consequence, holding perhaps civil or ecclesiastic office in the places whence they came. The vast majority had this in common, that they were foreigners, with no civil rights in Bologna. It behoved them to organize for their protection and mutual support, and for the furtherance of the purposes for which they had come. That a body of men in a foreign city should live under the law of their own home, or the law of their own making, did not appear extraordinary in the twelfth century. It was not so long since the principle that men carried the law of their home with them, had been widely recognized, and in all countries the clergy still lived under the law of the Church. The gains accruing from the presence of a great number of foreign students might induce the authorities of Bologna to permit them to organize as student guilds, and regulate their affairs by rules of their own, even as was done by other guilds in most Italian cities. At Bologna the power of Guelf and Ghibeline clubs, and of craftsmen’s guilds, rivalled that of the city magistrates.
There is some indirect evidence that these students first divided themselves into four Nationes. If so, the arrangement did not last. For by the middle of the thirteenth century they are found organized in two Universitates, or corporations, a Universitas Citramontanorum and a Universitas Ultramontanorum; each under its own Rector. These two corporations of foreign students constituted the University. The Professors did not belong to them, and therefore were not members of the University. Indeed they fought against the recognition of this University of students, asserting that the students were but their pupils. But the students prevailed, strong in their numbers, and in the weapon which they did not hesitate to use, that of migration to another city, which cut off the incomes of the Professors and diminished the repute and revenue of Bologna. So great became the power of the student body, that it brought the Professors to complete subjection, paying them their salaries, regulating the time and mode of lecturing, and compelling them to swear obedience to the Rectors. The Professors protested, but submitted. To make good its domination over them, and its independence as against the city, the student University migrated to Arezzo in 1215 and to Padua in 1222.[524]
In origin as well as organization, the University of Paris differed from Bologna. It was the direct successor of the cathedral school of Notre Dame. This had risen to prominence under William of Champeaux. But Abaelard drew to Paris thousands of students for William’s hundreds (or at least hundreds for William’s tens); and Abaelard at the height of his popularity taught at the school of St. Geneviève, across the Seine. Therefore this school also, although fading out after Abaelard’s time, should be regarded as a causal predecessor of the Paris University. So, for that matter, should the neighbouring school of St. Victor, founded by the discomfited William; for its reputation under Hugo and Richard drew devout students from near and far, and augmented the scholastic fame of Paris.
It was both the privilege and duty of the Chancellor of Notre Dame to license competent Masters to open schools near the cathedral. In the course of time, these Masters formed an Association, and assumed the right to admit to their Society the licentiates of the Chancellor, to wit, the new Masters who were about to begin to teach. In the decades following Abaelard’s death, the Masters who lectured in the vicinity of Notre Dame increased in number. They spread with their schools beyond the island, and taught in houses on the bridges. They were Masters, that is, teachers, in the Arts. As the twelfth century gave way to the thirteenth, interest in the Arts waned before the absorbing passion for metaphysical theology. This was a higher branch of study, for which the Arts had come to be looked on as a preparation. So the scholars of the schools of Arts became impatient to graduate, that is, to reach the grade of Master, in order to pass on to the higher study of theology. A result was that the course of study in the Arts was shortened, while Masters multiplied in number. Their Society seems to have become a definite and formal corporate body or guild, not later than the year 1175. Herein was the beginning of the Paris University. It had become a studium generale, like Bologna, because there were many Masters, and students from everywhere were admitted to study in their schools.