Mamoun at Bagdad a considerable collection of Greek manuscripts, which seems to have given the earliest impulse to the study of the Hellenic pagan literature by the Saracens. The original texts were translated into Arabic by Syrian Christians, and these versions were, in turn, rendered into Latin for the use of teachers in the West. Of the existence of such versions we have evidence, according to Jourdain,[1] long prior to the time when Constantine the African (d. 1087) began to deliver his lectures on the science at Salerno, although these early versions have since altogether disappeared. Under his teaching the fame of Salerno as a medical school became diffused all over Europe; it was distinguished also by its catholic spirit, and, at a time when Jews were the object of religious persecution throughout Europe, members of this nationality were to be found both as teachers and learners at Salerno. Ordericus Vitalis, who wrote in the first half of the 12th century, speaks of it as then long famous. In 1231 it was constituted by the emperor Frederick II. the only school of medicine in the kingdom of Naples.
The great revival of legal studies which took place at Bologna about the year 1000 had also been preceded by a corresponding Bologna. activity elsewhere—at Pavia by a famous school of Lombard law, and at Ravenna by a yet more important school of Roman law. And in Bologna itself we have evidence that the Digest was known and studied before the time of Irnerius (1100-30), a certain Pepo being named as lecturing on the text about the year 1076. The traditional story about the “discovery” of the Pandects at Amalfi in 1135 was disproved even before the time of Savigny. Schulte has shown that the publication of the Decretum of Gratian must be placed earlier than the traditional date, i.e. not later than 1142. This instruction again was of a kind which the monastic and cathedral schools could not supply, and it also contributed to meet a new and pressing demand. The neighbouring states of Lombardy were at this time increasing rapidly in population and in wealth; and the greater complexity of their political relations, their growing manufactures and commerce, demanded a more definite application of the principles embodied in the codes that had been handed down by Theodosius and Justinian. But the distinctly secular character of this new study, and its close connexion with the claims and prerogatives of the Western emperor, aroused at first the susceptibilities of the Roman see, and for a time Bologna and its civilians were regarded by the church with distrust and even with alarm. These sentiments were not, however, of long duration. In the year 1151 the Decretum of Gratian and the canon law. appearance of the Decretum of Gratian, largely compiled from spurious documents, invested the studies of the canonist with fresh importance; and numerous decrees of past and almost forgotten pontiffs now claimed to take their stand side by side with the enactments contained in the Corpus Juris Civilis. They constituted, in fact, the main basis of those new pretensions asserted with so much success by the popedom in the course of the 12th and 13th centuries. It was necessary, accordingly, that the Decretum should be known and studied beyond the walls of the monastery or the episcopal palace, and that its pages should receive authoritative exposition at some common centre of instruction. Such a centre was to be found in Bologna. The needs of the secular student and of the ecclesiastical student were thus brought for a time into accord, and from the days of Irnerius down to the close of the 13th century we have satisfactory evidence that Bologna was generally recognized as the chief school both of the civil and the canon law.[2] It has, indeed, been asserted that university degrees were instituted there as early as the pontificate of Eugenius III. (1145-53), but the statement rests on no good authority, and is in every way improbable. There is, however, another tradition which is in better harmony with the known facts. When Barbarossa marched his forces into Italy on his memorable expedition of 1155, and reasserted those imperial claims which had so long lain dormant, the professors of the civil law and their scholars, but more especially the foreign students, gathered Foreign students at Bologna. round the Western representative of the Roman Caesars, and besought his intervention in their favour in their relations with the citizens of Bologna. A large proportion of the students were probably from Germany; and it did not escape Frederick's penetration that the civilian might prove an invaluable ally in the assertion of his imperial pretensions. He received the suppliants graciously, and, finding that their grievances were real, especially against the landlords in whose houses they were domiciled, he granted the foreign students substantial protection, by conferring on them certain special immunities and privileges (November 1158).[3] These privileges were embodied in the celebrated Authentica, Habita, in the Corpus Juris Civilis of the empire (bk. iv. tit. 13), and were eventually extended so as to include all the other universities of Italy. In them we may discern the precedent for that state protection of the university which, however essential at one time for the security and freedom of the teacher and the taught, has been far from proving an unmixed benefit—the influence which the civil power has thus been able to exert being too often wielded for the suppression of that very liberty of thought and inquiry from which the earlier universities derived in no small measure their importance and their fame.
But, though there was a flourishing school of study, it is to be observed that Bologna did not possess a university so early The “universities” at Bologna. as 1158. Its first university was not constituted until the close of the 12th century. The “universities” at Bologna were, as Denifle has shown, really student gilds, formed under influences quite distinct from the protecting clauses of the Authentica, and suggested, as already noted, by the precedent of those foreign gilds which, in the course of the 12th century, began to rise throughout western Europe. These were originally only two in number, the Ultramontani and the Citramontani, and arose out of the absolute necessity, under which residents in a foreign city found themselves, of obtaining by combination that protection and those rights which they could not claim as citizens. These societies were modelled, Denifie considers, not on the trade gilds which rose in Bologna in the 13th century, but on the Teutonic gilds which arose nearly a century earlier in north-western Europe, being essentially “spontaneous confederations of aliens on a foreign soil.” Originally, they did not include the native student element and were composed exclusively of students in law.
The power resulting from this principle of combination, when superadded to the privileges conferred by Barbarossa, Their democratic character. gave to the students of Bologna a superiority of which they were not slow to avail themselves. Under the leadership of their rector, they extorted from the citizens concessions which raised them from the condition of an oppressed to that of a specially privileged class. The same principle, when put in force against the professors, reduced the latter to a position of humble deference to the very body whom they were called upon to instruct, and imparted to the entire university that essentially democratic character by which it was afterwards distinguished. It is not surprising that such advantages should have led to an imitation and extension of the principle by which they were obtained. Denifle considers that the “universities” at Bologna were at one time certainly more than four in number, and we know that the Other similar communities in Italy. Italian students alone were subdivided into two—the Tuscans and the Lombards. In the centres formed by secession from the parent body a like subdivision took place. At Vercelli there were four universitates, composed respectively of Italians, English, Provençals and Germans; at Padua there were similar divisions into Italians,
- ↑ Sur l'âge et l'origine des traductions latines, &c., p. 225.
- ↑ Denifle, Die Universitäten, &c., i. 48.
- ↑ See Savigny, Gesch. d. röm. Rechts, iii. 152, 491-92. See also Giesebrecht, Gesch. d. Kaiserzeit (ed. 1880), v. 51-52. The story is preserved in a recently discovered metrical composition descriptive of the history of Frederick I.; see Sitzungsberichte d. Bairisch. Akad. d. Wissenschaft, Phil.-Hist. Klasse (1879), ii. 285. Its authenticity is called in question by Denifle, but it would seem to be quite in harmony with the known facts.
