to the political importance of the French and English kings to the papacy.
Cologne with its Dominican house of studies was a third outlier, with strong
network ties to Paris. For a generation in the early 1300s, the papal court at
Avignon became a fourth center, but full of scholars with Paris and Oxford
connections. The highly creative philosophers (as we see in Figures 9.3 through
9.6) are those in geographical overlaps, belonging to several major centers;
Grosseteste, Bacon, Albertus, Aquinas, Ockham, Eckhart were at two centers,
Scotus at three. These figures incorporate in their own persons the intellectual
representations of the intersecting centers.
At the same time, the centers contained multiple grounds of factionalism.
There were the rival orders of Franciscans and Dominicans; there were internal
organizational conflicts within the most powerful order; there was the jealousy
of secular theologians against the privileges of the orders at the universities;
there was a struggle for control and autonomy between theological and arts
faculties. Conflicts took place across multiple dimensions. The two great or-
ders, emerging in the 1220s, by 1231 had laid claim to two theology chairs at
Paris. In 1255 the secular theology masters tried to have the mendicant orders
forbidden from lecturing at Paris; it was only with the intervention of the pope
that in 1257 Bonaventure and Aquinas were confirmed in their chairs—the
latter surrounded by an armed bodyguard to protect him from the seculars
(Gilson, 1944: 438; Hyman and Walsh, 1983: 505). This was the setting in
which the secular theologian Henry of Ghent attacked Aquinas at Paris in the
1270s, and Aquinas had attacked the claims of the arts masters to inde-
pendence from theological orthodoxy. Around 1315 the chancellor, Henry of
Harclay, attacked the Dominicans for attempting to teach at Oxford without
receiving a local M.A. (Gilson, 1944: 632); soon after, Harclay’s (probable)
student William of Ockham attacked the Realism of the theological philosophy,
which was now official doctrine of the orders. Such external bases of fac-
tional struggle within the university provided part of the energy of intellectual
creation.
The inner differentiation of the university and its autonomous field of
intellectual combat were two important ingredients of creativity. But they were
effective only when combined with the centralization which brought all the
networks together. For the life of philosophy, the university structured around
the higher faculty of theology was the key. Paris was not the only place where
a university corporation was formed. Law teachers and students were forming
guilds at Bologna by around 1100. Parallel with Paris in the late 1100s,
universities were also growing up at Oxford, Montpellier, and Salerno, the
latter two predominantly medical. With the exception of Oxford, which be-
came a network satellite of the Paris metropolis, these other universities had
almost no impact in the world of philosophy of this period. The same was true
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^515