Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

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. Thus banded together, students were able to negotiate their collective rights and liberties with the city’s authorities—with the implicit threat that they would all walk away from the city and deprive it of their economic custom if they did not get what they wanted. Students also found it convenient to negotiate as a bloc with their teachers, deciding what they would be taught and how much lecturers deserved to be paid, and censuring or sacking professors who offended them by dint of substandard teaching or unpopular opinions. It took some time for this informal system of student association to be recognized as a bona fide institution—it was only in 1158 that the Holy Roman emperor Frederick I Barbarossa granted the law known as Authentica habita, which conferred permanent privileges and rights on law students in Bologna and elsewhere.26 But the elemental f...