University of Bologna is founded

The University of Bologna was never founded in the way a king founds a college. In the last decades of the eleventh century, in a town of a few thousand people where the roads from Lombardy, Tuscany, Romagna and the Veneto meet, teachers began to lecture on the law books of the Roman emperor Justinian, above all the Digest, his sixth-century collection of the opinions of Roman jurists, which had hardly been read in the West for five hundred years. A lawyer called Pepo was already citing the Digest in a court case of 1076; the teacher who made the school famous was Irnerius, a master of the liberal arts who, the story goes, took up the law at the wish of Countess Matilda of Tuscany and is believed to have given his first law lectures between 1084 and 1088. He explained the text in short notes, glosses, written between the lines and in the margins, and the teachers who followed him were called the glossators. The year 1088 is a convention: it was fixed for the eight-hundredth birthday celebrated in 1888, and the poet Giosuè Carducci, who led the celebrations, admitted that no real founding date can be known.

Bologna rose because Europe needed lawyers. Emperors and popes were fighting over who should appoint bishops, and the towns of northern Italy were turning themselves into self-governing communes; every side looked for arguments in ancient law. Irnerius served Matilda and then her rival, Emperor Henry V, who recognised the commune of Bologna in 1116, and soon a poet could speak of 'learned Bologna' and its laws. Around 1140 Gratian, a monk of the city, put the laws of the Church in order in his Decretum, and Bologna taught both laws, the civil law of Rome and the canon law of the Church. Its students were mostly grown men, many of them already clergy or officials, and they came from all over Europe.

The school became an institution step by step. The teachers taught privately, for fees paid by their students, in their own houses. In 1155 masters and students met Emperor Frederick Barbarossa near the city, and in 1158, at the Diet of Roncaglia, where four of Irnerius's pupils advised him on the emperor's rights, he issued the privilege later called the Authentica Habita: scholars travelling for study were under the emperor's protection, and when sued could choose to be judged by their own master or by the bishop. Foreign students, who had no rights as citizens, banded together by origin into 'nations' and, by about 1200, into guilds, universitates, under rectors they elected themselves: the first 'universities' were these associations of students, who set the course of teaching and saw that it was given. In 1219 Pope Honorius III, once archdeacon of Bologna, ruled that no one could become a doctor without the archdeacon's licence, and at the end of the century Nicholas IV made a Bologna degree a licence to teach anywhere.

What Bologna built was copied across Europe. Students and teachers who left the city in protest set up new schools, at Vicenza in 1204 and at Padua in 1222, and Bologna's student guilds became the model for many later universities in Italy and beyond, while Paris, which grew up at the same time, was run by its masters. The Great Gloss that Accursius compiled between 1220 and 1250 accompanied the texts of Roman law for five hundred years, and the Roman law taught at Bologna became common ground for the legal systems of continental Europe. Faculties of medicine and of arts formed around 1200, and Bologna's doctors revived the dissection of human bodies in the thirteenth century. The school had no building of its own until 1563, when the pope's legate gathered it into the Archiginnasio, under the Church's control; since the Napoleonic years its seat has been Palazzo Poggi.

The university calls itself the Alma Mater Studiorum, the nourishing mother of studies, a name that grew out of the medieval city's motto, 'Bologna, mother of laws'. The idea it pioneered, a self-governing community of teachers and students that grants degrees and claims the freedom to teach and to learn, spread from medieval Europe to the whole world. On 12 June 1888 Carducci opened the eight-hundredth-anniversary celebrations in the courtyard of the Archiginnasio, and for the ninth centenary in 1988, 430 European rectors signed the Magna Charta Universitatum in the city's main square, a declaration of academic freedom that more than eight hundred universities have signed since.