The University of Cologne: Its Foundation and Early Operation

The medieval foundation of the University of Cologne was driven by the municipal authorities. On May 21, 1388, Pope Urban VI approved at Perugia a petition from Cologne’s councillors, municipal magistrates, citizens, and civic community to establish a university modeled on Paris. The document singled out theology, canon law, and other authorized disciplines, connecting the institution’s purposes with faith, justice, and public affairs.

Permission to establish the institution, arrangements for its support, and the start of classes each had their own chronology. On December 22, 1388, the city of Cologne assumed responsibility for funding, maintaining, and protecting it; teaching began on January 6, 1389. The foundation date of 1388 thus encompasses the formation of legal and civic commitments, while the first classes began the following year. It does not mean that all teaching started on the day the pope issued his charter.

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The city council appointed four overseers to liaise with the university and paid fixed salaries to some professors. Ecclesiastical support also maintained teachers through benefices at the cathedral and other churches. The university’s economic foundations therefore combined municipal payments with church resources. Civic initiative did not mean that teaching and degrees were independent of ecclesiastical institutions.

The charter stipulated that candidates seeking qualifications to teach and academic degrees must be presented by teachers in their discipline to the dean of Cologne Cathedral or his representative, and examined with the participation of qualified teachers in that subject. Only successful candidates could obtain the license to teach and the appropriate title. The rector supplied another layer of governance: the statutes of 1392 required him to convene meetings, conduct registration, maintain privileges, and handle members’ complaints. Different authorities were thus interwoven within a single institution.

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The early university was not a body that people automatically joined simply by attending classes. The statutes of December 6, 1392, required arriving masters, doctors, bachelors, and students to report to the rector, swear an oath, and register within their first two weeks. Those not yet registered could not enjoy privileges as university members, and their period of study could not count toward their academic progress in the usual way. Teachers and those providing accommodation were also responsible for encouraging compliance.

The oath included observance of university regulations and the maintenance of peace and concord within the community under the rector’s governance. These corporate rules linked admission with obedience, protection, and qualification. The provisions also made exceptions for members of the four mendicant orders, showing the overlap between universities and networks of learning in religious houses. The boundaries of membership cannot simply be understood in terms of a modern, uniform student-registration system.

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The statutes set the registration charge at six white pfennigs for the rector and university, with another coin for the university beadle. Poor applicants could receive exemptions, and the rector could waive part of the fees for prominent individuals such as doctors. In editing the registers, Hermann Keussen found that actual entries also recorded graduated reductions, deferred payments, and poverty established by oath or attestation.

These arrangements show that educational fees and social rank were interconnected. Assistance could admit poor people into the community, while prestige and personal relationships could also affect treatment. The beadle announced lectures, disputations, festivals, and meetings and helped the rector maintain order. University operations depended on a small but concrete system of personnel and charges, rather than founding privileges alone.

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At its opening, the university already included arts, theology, law, and medicine. Arts provided foundational training and should not be equated with modern fine-art education. The first lists of teachers include people educated in Paris, Prague, and Montpellier, such as Johann de Ubach, with a Parisian arts background, and Conrad de Breydschede, recorded as a master of arts from Prague. The teachers themselves carried knowledge across regions.

Book trading was also subject to university regulation. The statutes of 1392 required booksellers to swear an oath, prohibited them from trading on their own account under other people’s names, and prescribed procedures for publicly displaying books offered for sale. The university thus brought the circulation of texts under corporate supervision. The papal charter also recognized that those who obtained teaching licenses through proper examinations could teach at other universities without being examined again, providing an institutional basis for qualifications recognized beyond the city.

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Keussen’s critical study of the registers shows that the earliest surviving entries are not a complete daily record beginning with the first classes. Only in 1392 did the university decide to establish a separate paper register. Earlier entries were reconstructed from older records and rolls of applications to the pope for ecclesiastical benefices, making the original order of arrival difficult to recover. The first group of names also contains later additions, so each entry cannot be understood as one ordinary student present at the same moment.

The registers record teachers, people already holding degrees, and students, while preserving traces of movement between universities, repeated registrations, and omissions. They portray Cologne as a university that absorbed established scholars, organized admission oaths, and gradually improved its administrative records. Civic support, ecclesiastical recognition, the movement of teachers and students, and everyday statutes worked together to turn the commitment made in 1388 into an institution capable of sustained teaching.

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