Universitas originally meant any guild or corporation, not specifically a place of learning
In Latin, universitas simply meant a group of people joined into one body: a society, company, guild or corporation. As medieval towns grew, associations of students and teachers with charter-protected legal rights borrowed the general label. Like other guilds they policed themselves, deciding who qualified as a member, and the name stuck.
Historians who define the earliest universities tend to look for a bundle of traits: students drawn from far beyond the local region, at least one higher faculty of theology, law or medicine beyond the seven liberal arts, degrees awarded in a public oral ceremony run by a guild of masters, and some independence from church authorities. By those tests the pioneers were Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge and Palencia. Bologna, where a guild structure emerged around 1180 to 1190, dates its teaching to 1088, when Irnerius began lecturing on Justinian's recently recovered code of Roman law.
Academic freedom has a medieval birth certificate of sorts. The Constitutio Habita, issued in 1155 or 1158, guaranteed travelling scholars unhindered passage for the sake of study. On 18 September 1988, marking Bologna's 900th anniversary, 430 university rectors signed the Magna Charta Universitatum. Pope Gregory VII's decree of 1079 had earlier ordered the regulated establishment of cathedral schools, some of which grew into universities, although Paris may be one of the few cases where that transformation actually happened.
Labels are contested elsewhere. Nalanda, founded by the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I around 427 and destroyed in 1202, was a great Buddhist centre that drew the pilgrim Xuanzang, but scholars caution that calling it a university in the modern sense is imprecise. Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez began as a mosque founded by Fatima al-Fihri in 859 and, according to several historians, functioned as a madrasa until a reorganisation in 1963. Whether Islamic madrasas shaped Europe's first universities remains disputed: George Makdisi argued they did, while Norman Daniel considered the claim overstated.
What energised medieval campuses was the rediscovery of Aristotle, eventually over 3,000 pages in translation. The historian Richard Dales called it a turning point for Western thought, and scholasticism set out to reconcile Greek reasoning about nature with Christian scripture.
Source: University
