THE ATTRACTION OF THE BOLOGNA STUDIUM

By the end of the twelfth century the position of Bologna as the legal centre (or ‘mother of laws') of Europe was unchallenged and the studium had thousands of law students from all over Europe.

The law students not only attended lectures. They cut their teeth as lawyers by participating in disputations on set topics, in which each side presented an argument with supporting texts, after which the master presiding gave his solution to the problem. They were expected to equip themselves with a personal set of the more important texts. Authorised booksellers, known as stctinncaii exempla tenentes, held certified copies of the texts, which they hired out to students so that they could make their own copies. When their period of study was over, they would have the basic material to take with them. In this way former students were able to disseminate a knowledge of what they had learned in their own coun­tries.

Although the emphasis of the Bologna law school was academic rather than practical, the students who flocked there were not all moti­vated by a disinterested love of learning. The Gregorian reforms had stimulated many disputes of a quite unprecedented character. They could not be settled by sheer force, as had been the case in earlier cen­turies. There was a yearning for power to be legitimated, but standard collections of laws, whether of Roman or Germanic origin, offered little guidance on fundamental questions of jurisdiction and the like. Bishops and secular princes alike looked for men who could deploy arguments, based on principles which were objective and rational and had a univer­sal authority.

The University of Bologna was not founded by a deliberate act. It emerged out of the need, felt by the students of law, to organise them­selves for the purpose of ensuring that they received the most effective teaching and obtained a recognised qualification. In contrast with the other twelfth-century universities of Paris and Oxford, established and governed by masters, Bologna became the model of a university gov­erned by students, who employed the professors to teach them. Although other higher subjects, such as theology and medicine, were also taught there, law, both civil and canon, remained dominant.

Both the imperial and the papal authorities endeavoured to find favour with the Bolognese studium, by supporting it in its dealings with the municipal authorities of the city. The influx of students had created serious problems for the citizens but they did not want to lose the eco­nomic advantages that the students' presence brought them. The young

Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, on his way to Rome for his coronation in 1155, stopped at Bologna to meet the leading doctors of law and to seek their support, in justifying certain laws that he wished to enact. Having obtained their assistance, he promulgated the Conttitutio habita, in which he conferred privileges on law students coming to Bologna, whom he described as ‘pilgrims for the sake of study'. In particular Frederick recognised corporations of students, who were to be allowed to govern themselves in the manner of craft guilds. This concession enabled the students to negotiate with the professors but it also gave the ttudium as a whole a certain independence from the commune of Bologna.

By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the students were sufficiently strong that they could often get their way by threatening to secede from the town. The commune reacted by trying to keep them and it was now the turn of the papal authorities to intervene on the students' behalf. In 1217 Pope Honorius III pointed out that, instead of trying to compel the students to stay, it would be better for the commune to adopt measures that would encourage them to remain there of their own free will. Two years later, the Pope granted the archdeacon of Bologna the power to confer on successful students the right of teaching everywhere, thus indirectly subordinating the university to the Church.

The success of Bologna ensured its imitation through the foundation of law schools in other parts of Italy. There was a law school at Modena in 1175. The ttudium at Padua was begun in 1222, and the example was followed by other Italian centres, such as Pavia, where the old school of Lombard law developed into a school of civil and canon law. In 1224 the Emperor Frederick II founded the university of Naples, largely for the study of Roman civil law, and sought to ensure its success by command­ing his subjects to study there rather than in Bologna. At first the order applied only to those in the kingdom of Sicily, but, in the course of his dispute with the Lombard League, to which Bologna adhered, he extended the ban on studying at Bologna to his subjects in his Lombard dominions and to those in Germany and Burgundy. This might have proved disastrous for Bologna but again Pope Honorius III stepped in and obtained a revocation of the ban.

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