cessful.^20 Here there was less initial competition over students. The first uni-
versity in the region was founded at Prague in 1347, which carried on success-
fully with some 1,500 students until the early 1400s. Vienna, Cologne, and
Leipzig succeeded to the leadership, with as many as 1,000 students at various
times in the 1400s. The smaller German universities varied from 80 to 400
students, hitting their peak around 1450–1480 and declining thereafter.
One might expect this institutional growth to be associated with intellectual
creativity, but the opposite happened. Significant networks were not main-
tained; a central focus was lost. None of the new universities acquired anything
like the drawing power that Paris once commanded. Instead of a structure in
which multiple bases of factionalism intersect at a center, factionalism itself
became geographically localized. Intellectual borders hardened; conflict no
longer produced creative realignments but merely resulted in a habitual reit-
eration of dividing lines. Partly responsible was a decline in the international-
ism of the old high medieval centers, set in motion by external political forces.
Already in 1303 the French king was putting pressure on the Paris theologians
to support him in conflict with the pope; foreign scholars who refused, includ-
ing Duns Scotus, temporarily left Paris (Gilson, 1944: 710–711). There was a
growing tendency for scholars to stay at home. Now the French and English
wars restricted Englishmen from studying or teaching in France, and vice versa.
This nationalism was a new development, since earlier wars had not disturbed
the unity of Christendom. It was the new efforts of the rulers to control the
now highly developed church bureaucracy that was removing the institutions
of religious learning as a neutral meeting place. The papacy, responding to
slights in one place, licensed universities elsewhere; for instance, in 1316 the
pope licensed Toulouse to teach theology, overturning the monopoly of Paris
theologians in France. In 1359 a theological faculty was granted to a new
university at Florence, although it failed quickly for lack of students. In 1364
the preeminent legal university, Bologna, finally was granted a theological
faculty (Cobban, 1988: 144). The schism in the papacy, in which rival popes
arose almost every year from 1378 to 1449, fostered yet further foundations
and rivalries.
Nationalism and local factionalism made a self-reinforcing spiral. Pre-
viously the Paris masters had the right, granted by the pope, to teach in all
universities without reexamination; now this was contested by Oxford and
Montpellier. Universities now tended to break apart along intellectual lines
(de Wulf, 1937–1947: 3:50–196). Strong nominalist universities included Vi-
enna (founded in 1365), where the curriculum required only nominalist texts,
Heidelberg (founded in 1386), Erfurt (1392), Cracow (1397), and Leipzig
(1409). Cologne, where the old Dominican school was displaced by a degree-
granting university in 1388, was a stronghold of Thomism. At Louvain,
founded about 1425, the statutes prohibited the teaching of “nominalists,”
518 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths