A papal split let a small Rhineland capital found Germany's oldest university
When two rival popes emerged in 1378, German scholars in Paris backed Rome, lost their stipends and had to leave. Rupert I, ruler of the Palatinate, saw an opening and secured papal permission for a school of his own. Heidelberg held its first lecture on 19 October 1386.
The Great Schism began after Gregory XI died: the French cardinals installed a pope in Avignon, the Italians one in Rome. Rupert I negotiated with the Roman curia, received Urban VI's permission for a studium generale on 23 October 1385, and formally decided on the foundation on 26 June 1386. Following its charter, the school copied Paris, with faculties of philosophy, theology, law and medicine. It was the Holy Roman Empire's third university, after Prague in 1347 and Vienna in 1365. Marsilius of Inghen became first rector, under the motto semper apertus, the book of learning always open, and by March 1390 there were 185 students.
Religious currents washed through it. Martin Luther's disputation there in April 1518 won followers who went on to lead the Reformation in the southwest, and under Elector Otto Henry the university turned Calvinist; members of its divinity school helped compose the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563. Then came disaster. The Thirty Years' War began in 1618, and in 1622 the celebrated Bibliotheca Palatina was carried off to Rome. Louis XIV's troops nearly flattened the city in 1693, and Jesuits later steered the school away from Protestantism.
After losing its lands west of the Rhine following the French Revolution, the university seemed doomed until 1803, when Karl Friedrich of Baden refounded it as a state institution; it has carried his name alongside Rupert's ever since. The 19th century made it a model research university, admired in particular by the founders of Johns Hopkins, and several professors sat in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. A Baden decree of February 1900 let women enrol, making Heidelberg and Freiburg the first German universities to admit them.
Under the Nazis the university purged staff and students, and in 1933 the words above the New University's doorway, The Living Spirit, were replaced with The German Spirit. After 1945 new statutes bound it to the living spirit of truth, justice and humanity. By 2021 it counted 33 Nobel laureates, and some 1,000 doctorates are completed each year.
Source: Heidelberg University
