The Schools Around 1218 and the Later University
The early history of the University of Salamanca cannot begin with a surviving, intact foundation charter from 1218. In his Chronicon mundi, completed in 1236, Lucas of Tuy recorded that King Alfonso IX of León brought together teachers learned in sacred writings and established schools in Salamanca. Later research, drawing on surrounding events, places this initiative around 1218; some scholars use the range 1218–1219. If a foundation document ever existed, it no longer survives.
Thus, 1218 provides a starting point for understanding the schools’ origins, rather than a date on which the entire university system came into being. Salamanca already had a cathedral and clergy, and early teaching was closely connected to the city’s religious networks. Subsequent royal privileges, funding for courses, and papal recognition gradually organized the schools into an academic community extending beyond the locality.
Enabling Teachers and Students to Reach the City Safely
In a surviving decree dated April 6, 1243, Ferdinand III ordered that schools be established in Salamanca, protected the teachers, students, attendants, and property of those coming to teach or study, and confirmed customs and privileges already existing when his father had founded the schools. The king also required students to live peacefully and refrain from harming townspeople. Disputes among teachers and students or between them and residents were to be settled jointly by the bishop, dean, heads of religious communities, and other designated persons.
Another decree, dated March 12, 1252, extended protection to travel and provisions. Students or their attendants carrying goods for their own use were exempt from tolls. While traveling within the kingdom, they could not be arbitrarily detained unless the matter concerned their own debts or guarantees they had personally made. This was not a modern standardized admissions policy, but it directly reduced the obstacles faced by students moving from elsewhere and bringing supplies with them.
Organizational Rules Prompted by Student Requests
On May 8, 1254, Alfonso X issued organizational regulations at Toledo. The opening stated that the student community of the Salamanca studium had sent representatives to request various arrangements, which the king approved after consulting the bishop, archdeacon, and other clergy. Institutional development thus included demands originating within the schools; it should not be understood solely as a monarch unilaterally endowing an institution that previously had no arrangements of its own.
The regulations placed housing, public order, and teaching within a single framework. Students were forbidden to outbid others for houses already rented by fellow students. The studium’s conservators were responsible for setting reasonable rents, with a maximum of seventeen maravedís. Grain, wine, and other supplies brought into the city for sale were not to be obstructed. These provisions addressed the urban conditions on which teachers’ and students’ everyday lives depended, showing the studium’s interdependence with private housing and markets.
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Courses, Salaries, and the Supply of Books
The regulations listed one teacher of civil law with assistants, one teacher of the Decretum, two teachers of the Decretals, two each in logic, grammar, and medicine, and one in music. The document’s term “physic” meant medicine, not a modern physics department; nor can these posts be directly equated with present-day faculties. The concentration of teaching staff in law was particularly notable.
The civil-law teacher’s annual salary was set at five hundred maravedís, the teacher of the Decretum’s at three hundred, and the two teachers of the Decretals’ at five hundred in total. The king also provided an annual salary of one hundred for a stationer responsible for maintaining sound, accurate book exemplars, and established a post for pharmaceutical services. Book provision and medical support work were included in educational expenditure alongside classroom teaching; the stationer cannot simply be called the director of a modern public library.
The document allocated a total of two thousand five hundred maravedís annually for this teaching, support services, the conservators’ work, and necessary expenses. The conservators were to collect and administer the funds and render an annual account to the king or his nominee. This was a funding arrangement and a rule of accountability, not proof that the full amount was actually paid every year.
Protection Alongside Discipline
The studium’s privileges did not remove it from urban and ecclesiastical authority. The 1254 regulations required teachers and students to observe the bishop’s excommunications. The bishop and cathedral schoolmaster could detain students who provoked fights or disrupted study, or order them to leave the city. Townspeople who harmed students were to be punished by municipal officials. Protection and discipline of the academic community were thus implemented through specific jurisdictional relationships.
The king also required the bishop’s permission for the schools to use a common seal. In 1255, Alexander IV first confirmed the studium generale and then, on July 15, permitted the community of teachers, rectors, and students freely to possess and use a common seal. The conditions under which the community could conduct affairs in its own name were clarified gradually through successive documents.
Recognition of Qualifications and the Actual Movement of Knowledge
A papal bull of September 22, 1255, addressed another difficulty: those who had passed examinations and been licensed to teach at Salamanca often had to undergo examination again at other schools. The bull allowed qualified teachers to teach the subjects in which they had been examined at other studia generalia without repeating the examination, but explicitly excluded Paris and Bologna. Recognition of qualifications still had clearly defined limits.
The exchange of knowledge also left material traces. Studying thirteenth-century wills, Rucquoi found that local churchmen collected and bequeathed books of papal decretals, the Digest, and legal commentaries. A will of 1273 also mentioned salary still owed by the studium’s conservators. These records show the circulation of legal knowledge while reminding us to distinguish institutional promises from actual practice. The early university grew gradually through the interaction of royal support, ecclesiastical authorization, teachers’ income, and networks of books.