Universities and colleges generally present themselves as grand, well-established institutions, existing on a continuum stretching all the way back to people like Plato and Pythagoras. But the truth is, most of them are pretty young, relatively speaking, barely scratching a few centuries out of the history books.
But that makes sense, right? After all, as everyone knows, people in the past were super dumb, believing in things like witchcraft and zombies over, say, the importance of washing your hands. Of course they didn’t have universities!
Well, actually, that’s not true at all. The oldest universities go way, way back – like, “before Europeans made it to North America” way back, and we’re talking Vikings, not Columbus.
But who was first?
The first ever universities
Universities, as we understand them today, are almost entirely a European invention, developing first of all in the Middle Ages. There are a bunch of reasons why that is: a lot of it may well be thanks to the Islamic Golden Age, from which a flood of newly translated works from around the known world were suddenly made available to European scholars.
Equally important, however, was the (possibly entirely accidental) rediscovery in around 1070 CE of a collection of 500-year-old legal manuscripts. Called the Corpus iuris civilis, or Body of Civil Law, it contained within it a huge number of laws and edicts dating from the reign of Justinian – and it was like catnip to the people of medieval Europe. What Justinian said, went – and Justinian, it transpired, was a fan of the right to incorporate, or form bodies such as guilds.
Without that right, it’s likely that universities as we know them wouldn’t have got the start they did. The first universities – known at the time as universitates, the Latin term for a corporation or company – weren’t so much “formally established” as they were “eventually noticed”, basically appearing only after enough students and masters had congregated in one place for long enough that it had become too awkward not to have a university there.
“There is no ‘official founding document’” for any of the oldest universities in the world, explained historian Cait Stevenson, author of How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero’s Guide to the Real Middle Ages and host of the podcast Whose Dark Ages?
“[That’s] a common medieval situation,” she added. “It’s clear that the universities were evolutions out of pre-existing practice.”
But this leaves us with a problem. With no clear or official starting dates for the first universities, how can we know which one got there first?
The oldest university in the English-speaking world
There are, traditionally, three universities that claim to be the oldest in the world – and it just so happens that one of them is in the Anglosphere. That makes it very easy to guess where it must be, because back in medieval times, there was only one place in the world that spoke English: England.
So which English university has been around longer than any other? It’s a famous one – the University of Oxford, which traces its history back to 1096 CE. At more than 900 years old, could this be the oldest university in the world?
Well, almost certainly not. “Oxford’s claim is actually the fishiest,” Stevenson wrote. “Oxford in the 11th century wasn’t exactly a backwater, but it was no intellectual center.”
In fact, the earliest reference to teaching at Oxford comes from one Theobald of Étampes, a medieval scholar and rather scandalously pro-sex theologian. Almost everything we know about this guy comes from six letters he wrote to various people during his life – and it’s in one of these, dating from “around 1100”, Stevenson explains, that he refers to himself as a “master at Oxford”.
“Not any kind of formal, established school,” she points out. “Just a master who had students.”
Throughout the next century, records start to crop up of more and more teachers in Oxford, but it wasn’t until 1231 that they were formally recognized as a universitas. It was even later that things like halls of residence or the famous collegiate system were introduced – and so, while Oxford has a pretty good claim to be one of the oldest universities in the world, it’s almost certainly not the oldest.
The oldest university not in the world
So, keeping in mind what we’ve just seen – that facts from this long ago are generally a bit, well, fuzzy round the edges – who takes the crown? Well, Oxford may not have been the first, but it wasn’t far off –in fact, only two universities can match its claims for longevity: Paris and Bologna.
For Paris, the situation is as sticky as in Oxford. Like its English counterpart, the University of Paris existed long before it was granted formal recognition in 1200: “when Philip Augustus gave the new academical guild his royal approval, it was already in a condition of vigorous activity,” recorded Oxford historian George Charles Brodrick in 1886.
In any case, the French capital was a much more obvious choice for an emerging intelligentsia than some recently sacked town halfway between London and Wales. As a cultural, economic, religious, and royal center, it had everything a young hub of learning would need – including, importantly, several previously established schools, dating back at least to the 10th century.
It was one of these – specifically, the Cathedral School of Notre Dame – that would eventually morph into the University of Paris. We know at least that Peter Abelard studied there under William of Champeaux some time before 1108, and over the following decades other medieval legends such as Peter Lombard brought the city’s collection of masters and students enough of a reputation to make its eventual incorporation something of a foregone conclusion.
But sadly for Paris, there’s a tiny technicality that means it can’t claim the title for longest-standing university: it… isn’t standing anymore. Shut down first of all during the French Revolution – not totally surprising, since the revolutionaries were radical to the point of overhauling the concept of time itself – the University was then re-founded in 1896, only to be dissolved again in 1970.
Félicitations, Paris; tu as joué toi-même.
The oldest university in the world
Which leaves us with Bologna. Go to the website of said city’s university, and you’ll see a founding date of 1088 advertised – a venerable age for an institute by any metric. But just as with Oxford and Paris, this supposed year of establishment is pretty much a fiction: “It was agreed to celebrate the studium’s 800th anniversary in 1888 for matters of convenience, not because of any specific documentary evidence,” noted David Lines, Professor of Renaissance Philosophy and Intellectual History in the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance.
Bologna’s claim isn’t pure baloney, though. “For the second half of the 11th century we know of several lay and ecclesiastical schools in Bologna that taught subjects such as liberal arts, notarial art, and theology,” explains Lines. “There was also a school of law, and one of letter writing […] where students gathered around particular masters.”
We have evidence of, at the very least, law being studied in Bologna at that time – in fact, it was here that the Corpus iuris civilis was first taught, first by Pepo and then by Irnerius (you can tell how far back we’ve gone, because this was literally before Italian people had surnames). And while, as with Paris and Oxford, its official charter came a little later, it still beats its rivals handily on this count, receiving its Authentica habita – the formal document laying out the rights and responsibilities of students and teachers at Bologna, issued by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa – in 1158.
The university older than the oldest university in the world
So, is that it then? Bologna reigns supreme as the oldest university in the world? Well, yes – and no. Depending on how you look at it, there are a couple of universities that have been around longer, and yet don’t strictly count as older than Bologna.
According to UNESCO, the oldest university in the world is not Bologna, but the University of al-Qarawiyyin, in Fez, Morocco. On paper, the claim seems pretty cut-and-dried, too: it was founded in the late 850s CE by Fatima al-Fihri, beating all three European contenders by a good two centuries. So why doesn’t it count?
In fact, to some people, it does. Guinness World Records, for example, awards al-Qarawiyyin the top spot, relegating Bologna to “oldest in Europe”; the Encyclopedia Britannica, too, says that the university was “founded in AD 859.”
But this view is far from universal. Al-Qarawiyyin was not established as a university, or even as a formal educational establishment, critics point out – it was originally a mosque, around which a madrasa eventually grew. The earliest evidence for teaching at al-Qarawiyyin may be as late as the 1120s – by which point all three European contenders had got going.
So too had the al-Azhar madrasa in Cairo, founded in about 970 CE specifically as a higher learning establishment, so if any Islamic center takes the title, it’s arguably there.
Here’s the problem: while both establishments are known as universities today, they weren’t originally – and many scholars would point out that a madrasa is simply not the same thing as a university. In fact, the very laws and traditions that made the latter possible in Europe – in particular, the concept of corporations existing as legal entities – were “alien to Classical Islamic law,” noted Burhan Fındıklı, then a PhD student in the University of Bergen’s Department of Administration and Organization Theory.
“The understanding of the madrasa as a community with its own interests was probably not the case,” Fındıklı points out, while many of the hallmarks of a university education – degrees, examinations, and even a formal curriculum – were generally absent in madrasas.
And that’s why, despite being universities – and despite unquestionably being older than any other university – neither al-Qarawiyyin nor al-Azhar get to call themselves the oldest university in the world. Which just goes to show: no matter how smart you are, you can always get disqualified on a technicality.
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