Why did the University of Paris become preeminent among medieval institutions of higher learning?

Why did the University of Paris become preeminent among medieval institutions of higher learning?

The first university was founded in Bologna, Italy, in 1158. Two hundred years earlier, in Spain, Islamic institutions of higher learning were generally attached to mosques, since learning was considered sacred. At first, the term university meant simply a union of students and the instructors with whom they contracted to teach them.

Universitas was an umbrella term for collegia, the groups of students who shared a common interest or, as at Bologna, hailed from the same geographic area. The University of Bologna quickly established itself as a center for the study of law (Fig. 12.17), an advanced area of study for which students prepared by mastering the seven liberal arts.

Proficiency in Latin was mandatory, and students studied Latin in all courses of their first four years of study. They read the writings of the ancient Greeks—Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid—in Latin translation. Augustine of Hippo’s On Christian Doctrine was required reading, as were Boethius’s writings on music and arithmetic. To obtain their bachelor of arts (BA) degree, students took oral exams after three to five years of study. Further study to acquire mastery of a special field led to the master of arts (MA) degree and might qualify a student to teach theology or practice medicine or law. Four more years of study were required to acquire the title of doctor (from the Latin, doctus, “learned”), culminating in a defense of a thesis before a board of learned examiners.

The Medieval University, 2:13

During the early Middle Ages, any type of higher education was usually available only in monasteries and cathedral schools, where Christian monks and nuns taught each other and preserved the writings of classical authors. But by the eleventh-century, medieval Europe was becoming more urban and complex, and royal governments needed highly trained men to run their bureaucracies. Students and teachers were also demanding better ways to be educated, and the solution to this came about with the creation of universities. Universities come from the Latin word universitas, which means guild, and these schools were essentially groups of students and teachers who got together into their own groups for the purposes of learning -- in some universities it was the students themselves who paid the teachers and ran the institution. The main curriculum was based on seven areas - grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy - all of which were important for a cleric in the Catholic church. In some universities, other subjects were also important - Salerno was renowned as a place to study medicine and Bologna for law. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries universities were becoming important centres of learning and some would become quite famous - like Oxford and Cambridge in England, and the University of Paris in France. In the later Middle Ages, universities would emerge in most other parts of Europe too, as monarchs and cities wanted them as sources of highly-skilled bureaucrats and to increase their own reputation. Occasionally, though, the relations between university students and their local communities could get hostile, and since students were treated as clergy, it meant that they could not be tried by local courts for crimes, only the much more lenient ecclesiastical courts. While very few medieval men (and no women) could be part of a university, the institution did develop and grow throughout the Middle Ages, and became home to some of the periods greatest thinkers -- such as Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas. The university has since become the standard of higher education not just in Europe, but throughout the world.