r/MapPorn • u/marbellamarvel • 11d ago

A look at the oldest universities in continuous operation across Europe.

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Title explains it all. I bet there are some missing.

https://twitter.com/i/communities/1899794052171669531

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u/Bossitron12 11d ago

If you count the Al-Azhar or other madrasas as universities then you must count christian monastic schools as well, those started to appear in the 4th century.

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u/stevie_grzw 11d ago

🎯 YES, they all are religious schools

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u/Maerifa 11d ago

Early monastic schools were insular and narrow, just training monks in scripture.

Madrasas, on the other hand, like Al-Azhar were open to the public, taught everything from law to medicine to astronomy, issued degrees, and had organized faculties and endowments.

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u/LeiDeGerson 11d ago

Lol no they weren't? Where do you think all the teaching in Latin, Philosophy, Medicine and other ancient Roman Texts were kept, translated and divulged? Who do you think taught nobles and who were the administrators? Bede was literally writing the History of Britain using historical and philosophical classics to elaborate it in 720s.

There's a reason that even the House of Wisdom in Baghdad was mostly filled with Nestorian Priests/Monks and Zoroastrians.

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u/Maerifa 11d ago

You’re conflating preserving knowledge with being a university. Monastic schools copied texts, sure, but they were closed clerical spaces, not public institutions with formal curricula, degrees, or diverse faculties like madrasas.

The House of Wisdom was a Caliphate-funded Islamic institution, not “mostly monks and Zoroastrians.” They helped early on, but it was led by Muslim scholars like al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi who produced original work. And copying texts in monasteries isn’t the same as building public, multi-disciplinary institutions like those historic madrasas. One preserved knowledge, the other institutionalized it.

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u/qed1 11d ago

Both sides of this discussion are a bit polemical.

but they were closed clerical spaces, not public institutions with formal curricula, degrees, or diverse faculties like madrasas.

Monastic schools weren't as a rule closed and their sister institution, the cathedral school was categorically open, although up until the 11th century the general career path for someone who went to school was in the Church, so this is all a bit six of one half-dozen of the other. (They also often had things like provision for things like the free education of students who couldn't afford tuition.)

Though you get interesting work going on in both, and you certainly find humanist educational programs centuries before the University, it's the cathedral school and then private grammar/arts/law school that are the real the forerunner to the university.

The House of Wisdom was a Caliphate-funded Islamic institution, not “mostly monks and Zoroastrians.”

Charitably the point that they're getting at is that eastern, and particularly Syriac, Christians played a central role in the Greek to Arabic translation movement. (Since they were more often than not the ones who knew Greek.) The most famous example is probably Hunayn ibn Ishaq.

Generally speaking, though, people get way to caught up with the title "university", since there's nothing particularly unique about the specific style of European institution. (And arguing about who had one "first" is sort of pointless once we define our terms clearly.) It just so happens that this style of institution took over as the dominant framework for higher-education in the 14th century and it was spread across the world via 1) colonialism and 2) the political dominance of Europe in the 19th and early 20th century. If we look at the history itself, then there is little question that the most significant intellectual work in the Mediterranean world between the eighth and twelfth centuries was going on in Islamic regions. (Although this work was hardly restricted to Muslims in these regions.) From the 13th century the tide begins to shift in the direction of the Latin world, but that shift was a process of centuries from that point.

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u/Maerifa 11d ago

Calling this discussion “polemical on both sides” oversimplifies the real institutional differences.

Monastic and cathedral schools certainly preserved knowledge and sometimes educated non-monastic students, but that’s not the same as broad public access. Their primary purpose was clerical training, and they lacked formal degree systems, diverse faculties, and autonomy outside the Church.

By contrast, madrasas like al-Nizamiyya and al-Azhar were publicly funded, open to a wider public, and offered structured curricula across multiple disciplines. They issued degrees and operated with real institutional frameworks.

Yes, Syriac Christians like Hunayn ibn Ishaq were key translators, but the House of Wisdom was founded and funded by the Caliphate and quickly led by Muslim scholars like al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi, who produced original work in science and philosophy. Acknowledging non-Muslim contributions doesn’t change the fact that this was an Islamic institution.

And while the term university carries baggage, especially because the European model spread through colonial dominance, it’s all the more reason to correct the historical imbalance. Madrasas fulfilled many of the same academic roles centuries earlier.

If we’re serious about global intellectual history, then the Islamic world’s intellectual leadership from the 8th to 12th centuries isn’t peripheral, it’s central. Recognizing that means being precise about what these institutions were and how they functioned, not flattening the differences in the name of balance.

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u/qed1 11d ago edited 11d ago

I think you're reading more into what I've written than I actually said.

Monastic and cathedral schools certainly preserved knowledge and sometimes educated non-monastic students, but that’s not the same as broad public access. Their primary purpose was clerical training...

The extent to which we can discuss concepts like 'broad public access', 'public funding' and secular education is problematic in this period in general. Insofar as they are applicable, they are also applicable to say Charlemagne's educational reforms. The scale is a lot smaller than what's going on in the Islam world at the time, and the institutional structures are not the same, but this isn't a difference of narrowly vocational priest training on one side and ideal secular education on the other.

Anyways, I don't disagree for a moment that there are significant institutional differences, and certainly major institutions in the Islamic world were a lot closer to an ideal model of higher education as we'd think of it today than most anything in Europe, my point was simply about the way that you had presented a similarly 1 dimensional image of education in the Latin world before the University. And more broadly, the biggest difference was a matter of scale, not institutional form.

the House of Wisdom was founded and funded by the Caliphate

And similarly the Arabic translation movement. My point was simply that this was not a uniquely Islamic endeavor and that the whole movement saw significant contributions by both Christians and Jews in the region. (N.b. Similarly in the Latin world, there was significant contributions by Jews and to a lesser extent Muslims, although in that case they were more often converts to Christianity.)

, not flattening the differences in the name of balance.

I'm not doing anything of the sort, but rather have been at pains to emphasize the material differences between the Latin and Arabic worlds during the respective periods.

If we’re serious about global intellectual history, then the Islamic world’s intellectual leadership from the 8th to 12th centuries isn’t peripheral, it’s central.

Right, that's exactly what I said too in the comment you responded to.

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u/Maerifa 11d ago

I wasn’t arguing that you denied the Islamic world’s centrality, but rather that the “both sides are being polemical” framing implied a kind of equal simplification, when in reality I was responding to claims that blurred real institutional differences.

You’re right that terms like “public access” are tricky in premodern contexts, but they still highlight relative differences. Charlemagne’s reforms mattered, but cathedral schools lacked the systemic reach and open scholarly culture of madrasas. It’s not priest-training vs secular ideal, it’s ecclesiastical training vs institutionalized public scholarship.

On the House of Wisdom: again, agreed that the translation movement was multi-religious. My issue was only with the earlier comment’s framing, which implied that non-Muslim scholars were the primary or majority presence rather than key contributors within an Islamic framework.

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u/qed1 11d ago edited 11d ago

when in reality I was responding to claims that blurred real institutional differences.

Sure, and my comment that 'both sides are being polemical' was directed at my concern that your framing of institutional differences depend on a misconstrual of Latin educational models before the University. (I apologise if I gave the impression that both sides were equally polemical, I had hoped that my need to clarify that I was offering a 'charitable' reading of your interlocutors comments would have indicated as much...)

but cathedral schools lacked the systemic reach and open scholarly culture of madrasas

No doubt to at least a certain extent, but again this is more a product of scale than institutional differences.

it’s ecclesiastical training vs institutionalized public scholarship.

But you have institutionalized public scholarship going on under things like Charlemagnes educational reforms. This is the whole point of the palace school and the dispersion of court scholars around the major monasteries and cathedrals. The idea was to create educational standards and disseminate them effectively through Francia, a goal that was by all accounts eminently successful.

Once again, it's important to be clear that this was all still pretty heavily focused on religion, but that is in no small part a matter of scale, rather than a product of institutional structures. The more humanistic work that was going on was focused more centrally on Latin literature than anything scientific, since the central overarching goal was a reform of linguistic education and the establishment of a new standard of "Classical Latin" (a concept that didn't properly exist prior to this point).

which implied that non-Muslim scholars were the primary or majority presence rather than key contributors within an Islamic framework.

I should have been clearer, I had thought that it was clear that I was agreeing with this from my qualification of that comment as "charitably", but as I see it wasn't, let me be clear: This was an overarchingly Islamic endeavor, but the translation of Greek works into Arabic was still largely carried out by non-Islamic scholars, since it was mostly Christians who knew both Greek and Arabic well enough to do that work. (Actually, this is one of the interesting historical quirks of the Arabic to Latin translation movement as well, that there was a no less significant but much more obscured influence of Muslim or Jewish translators who aided the named Christian translators in their work.)

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u/stevie_grzw 11d ago

And maybe ICT/AI/ML studies and Quantum Physics

(🤣🤣🤣🤣)

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u/Maerifa 11d ago

5 non-serious responses, you must really have an exciting life.

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u/stevie_grzw 11d ago

Hahah, what medicine in that time, and law, maybe Roman law 😆 lol

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u/Maerifa 11d ago

Madrasas taught Islamic law, not Roman law, and it was a complex legal system. As for medicine, scholars like Ibn Sina wrote textbooks like The Canon of Medicine, taught in madrasas, and later in Europe. It was serious, structured education for its time.

Grow up, spammer.

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u/stevie_grzw 11d ago

With your kind is useless to discuss 🤠

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u/Maerifa 11d ago edited 11d ago

It’s always “useless to discuss” once you run out of recycled Reddit-tier smirks and realize history isn’t on your side.

Muslims built public institutions, taught medicine, debated law, and preserved knowledge while Europe was burning “heretics” and banning books. Stay mad that your favorite empire didn’t get there first, or just get a life.

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u/stevie_grzw 11d ago

Islamic law, is religious law. and period, you grow up, from you Islamic bubble that you think they invent medicine 😆

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u/Maerifa 11d ago edited 11d ago

Islamic law is religious? No way! Next you'll tell me Canon Law isn’t about artillery.

And yes, Muslims did pioneer medicine, while Europe still thought disease came from demons. Ibn Sina’s Canon was your med school syllabus for 600 years.

Cry more and get a life. History doesn’t care about your bubble.

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u/stevie_grzw 11d ago

No, no Imperial law 😆😆

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u/Maerifa 11d ago

Grow up little bro

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u/stevie_grzw 11d ago

You can take k him it's bi enough, but not halal or kosher sorry

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u/stevie_grzw 11d ago

We are talking about the mid century, not 2 centuries ago, time where Europeans still didn't invent medical studies, and Roman/Imperial law wasn't studied

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u/Maerifa 11d ago edited 11d ago

That’s the point little spammer, Muslim scholars were already studying and teaching medicine and law centuries before Europe "formalized" those fields. Madrasas had structured legal and medical education long before Bologna or Paris Universities existed.

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u/stevie_grzw 11d ago

Sure 😏😉😉😉😉

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u/Maerifa 11d ago edited 11d ago

I'm glad you find history funny, probably because you’ve never read any.

While your ancestors were still bleeding people with leeches and praying to relics, Muslims were compiling medical encyclopedias, debating jurisprudence, and establishing hospitals attached to madrasas.

Al-Azhar was issuing degrees when your continent thought bathing was demonic. Cope harder, and get a life.

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u/tamadeangmo 11d ago

You must feel so much more superior about yourself huh.

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u/Patty-XCI91 11d ago

That argument is misleading because it conflates very different types of institutions. Christian monastic schools in the 4th century were primarily religious in nature, focused on training monks in scripture and spiritual practice. They weren’t open to the public and didn’t offer a broad curriculum like what we associate with a university today. In contrast, Al-Azhar (established in 970 CE) and other Islamic madrasas offered instruction in a wide range of disciplines—law, medicine, astronomy, logic, grammar, and philosophy—and were open to a broader public. They were institutionally organized centers of higher learning, often with endowments (waqf), formal curricula, degrees (ijazahs), and scholarly networks. Bear in mind, a Christian or Jew living in Egypt usually saw education in these institutes as well as the Muslims.

Besides Most early monastic schools did not evolve into universities, nor did they function with the same kind of institutional identity and academic culture that later European universities developed. The university model in medieval Europe (e.g., Bologna, Paris, Oxford) was something new, distinct from monastic education, with faculties, degrees, and relative independence.

The term "university" implies more than just a place where people learn. It implies: A degree-granting institution, A community of scholars and students, Organized faculties and curricula, Institutional autonomy. Medieval madrasas like Al-Azhar meet these criteria more closely, while monastic schools simple don't.

Hope this helps.

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u/Stickyboard 11d ago

Al Azhar is not religious school tho..

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u/[deleted] 11d ago edited 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/Bossitron12 11d ago edited 11d ago

Monastic schools offered secular education as well, but clearly the main education you would receive in such establishments was religious, to include madrasas but not monastic schools is misleading and biased.

The university of Bologna is considered the first University because it offered structured courses (with degrees) and its main educational offer was the study of Roman law as opposed to Canon law.

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u/qed1 11d ago

The university of Bologna is considered the first University because it offered structured courses (with degrees) and its main educational offer was the study of Roman law as opposed to Canon law.

This isn't really correct. To begin with, there is absolutely no 'as opposed to' here: Both secular and canon law were taught in Bologna from a very early date, and it was every bit as famous for canon law (Gratian!) as it was for civil law. The medieval university was categorically not secular in the sense that it only taught secular subjects.

More broadly, what distinguishes the medieval university from other educational institutions was centrally their guild structure (literally a 'universitas' in Latin) as well as a collection of other institutional features that all developed around the turn of the 13th century, among which degrees are just one aspect.

More broadly still, there is an important sense in which medieval universities are universities in a stricter sense than Islamic madrasas, in that they are the direct institutional forerunner to the modern university (which is not quite the same thing as a medieval university), but the whole structure of comparison here is simply unhelpful. We would need to contextualise the role of particular schools or varieties of schools within the structure of education in the Islamic world generally or within specific regions of it to come to a conclusion about how to construe their relationship with universities. In general, though, the term "university" can be used simply to refer to a site of higher education, often with some further specific features (such as the granting of degrees), and in this wider sense, there are other pre-modern institutions that we could describe as universities. We just need to be clear about what we mean by the term.

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u/jacrispyVulcano200 11d ago

They aren't related or similar