Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The mechanism by which Bologna became a university was essentially a process of unionization. Because many—perhaps most—of Bologna’s legal scholars from the eleventh century onward were noncitizens, they did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship and were subject to onerous laws levied on foreigners. Natives of each different country living in Bologna were regarded as collective entities and punished en masse if one of their number broke the city’s laws or defaulted on debt, a legal concept known as the right of reprisal. To resist this, Bologna’s eleventh-century students therefore began to organize themselves into mutual aid societies, known in Latin as universitas scholarium, which in turn could act collectively as the studium.