began to attract students from all over Europe. The intellectual leadership of Paris was
sealed with the incorporation of the masters and students as the University of Paris,
beginning with recognition of the rights of students by Philip Augustus in 1200 and
culminating with papal recognition in 1209/ 10. Indeed, at Philip’s death in 1223, Paris
was a rich, flourishing walled city, Europe’s foremost administrative and intellectual
center, a position that it maintained through the next century. The renowned cultural and
intellectual brilliance of Paris in the age of Louis IX (r. 1226–70) was in fact the creation
of his grandfather.
This period also marked a time of brilliant achievements in music. A movement
dubbed Ars Antiqua by modern scholars and associated in its earliest stages with
composers at Notre-Dame, saw the first development of a large repertory of rhythmically
measured polyphonic music. Both the repertory—including the genres organum,
conductus, and motet—and the body of music theory describing the music had enormous
and lasting influence on the subsequent history of music in the West. Paris maintained
Paris, Sainte-Chapelle. Photograph
courtesy of Whitney S.Stoddard.
its leading role into the 14th century with the further musical innovations of Ars Nova.
Paris was also a center of activity for minstrels. The statutes of the Confrérie de Saint-
Julien des Ménétriers was signed by thirty-seven ménestrels and ménestrelles in 1321.
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