It was in order to prepare laborers for this sublime enterprise that this plan of studies, as varied as extended, was prepared. Do you not see all it supposes—the comprehension of the authors, schools, and men capable of applying the plan? And it did not remain a mere project; it began to be executed. The University of Paris proposed to establish a professorship of the Tartar language. It was not done till a later day, because the university only acts with a view to science; but the church did not delay, prompted by a more noble motive. At Rome it taught the oriental languages in its colleges; at Paris, the monks of St. Père de-Chartres, at the annual expense of one thousand francs, opened, for the space of three years, a school for young men from the East, who returned to their country carrying with them the acquirements of the West and the eternal truths of religion. [Footnote 261]
[Footnote 261: Cartulary of St. Père de Chartres.]
The councils (that of Vienna in 1311) decreed that the oriental languages. should be taught at Paris, Salamanca, Bologna, Oxford, and all the great universities. The church wishes to diffuse knowledge in order to evangelize the world; it arms men with science that they may be more powerful, and it pushes them forward in the career of learning, that, at the end, they may find God.
VII.
Ardor For Learning.
And the church has always found disciples eager to listen to its instructions. The very barbarians, it has been remarked, were not averse to study; they had, on the contrary, that innate taste for letters which distinguishes the Germanic race. The Franks were easily instructed; they mingled among the Gauls of the South in the course of rhetoric and poetry, (at Bordeaux in the fifth and sixth centuries;) St. Medard, Bede, and Mici counted them by thousands in their schools. When the twelfth century opened more numerous schools, an immense crowd hastened to them. It was an invasion of recruits, who wished to learn the use of the arms of knowledge, in England, Germany, and Italy; at Milan there were eighty masters who were laymen; France above all, displayed its characteristic ardor. At Paris, colleges were founded one after another; two at the end of the twelfth century, fifteen in the thirteenth and fourteenth; one half of Paris was transformed into schools. That of the Canons of Notre Dame extended from the church to the Petit-Pont; then it passed over the left bank and ascended the mountain [Footnote 262] —the mountain that has preserved the name of Quartier Latin—the true realm of science imagined by the poets, where lived, in close proximity, turbulent bands of students from every land, in groups, according to their nations and languages.
[Footnote 262: Vict. le Clerc, Histoire de la Litterature au treizième siècle.]
Foreigners [Footnote 263] proclaimed Paris the centre of knowledge, and, in a right and elevated sense, the leader of Europe. There was then some merit in the pursuit of knowledge. The name of one of the streets of Paris, the Rue du Fouare, so-called from the straw and hay upon which they seated themselves, bears witness to the ardor of these students of the dark ages, less anxious for their ease than to obtain knowledge. They rewarded their own masters, and valued no expense to obtain those most renowned; they sent to all parts of Europe for them, and gave them a position often ten times more valuable than that of the professors of our time. [Footnote 264]
[Footnote 263: John of Salisbury, Dante, Brunetto Latini, etc.]
[Footnote 264: Le Play, Réforme sociale, (47,) and Mateucci, Les Universites d'Italie, (Revue des Cours scientifiques, 1867.)]