How Portugal got its first university: King Dinis's charter of 1290

The document is dated at Leiria, on 1 March 1290. King Dinis, who had reigned since 1279, had his chancery draw up a Latin charter that began with praise of learning: Scientiae thesaurus mirabilis, “the wonderful treasure of knowledge”. The preamble said that knowledge should light up both the spiritual and the temporal world.2 sources2 sources

Then it came to the point. The king declared that he had founded a general school of studies, an Estudo Geral, in Lisbon, dedicated to the Virgin Mary and to Saint Vincent, with many doctors in all the arts. So that students arriving from different places would be safe in their persons and goods, he took all of them, present and future, under royal protection against any offence or injury.1 source1 source

Estudo Geral is the Portuguese for studium generale, the medieval name for a university: a school of several faculties whose graduates could go on to teach elsewhere. Portugal had none. Anyone who wanted to study, or to be ordained, had to travel to distant parts, at great cost and some danger, as a petition to the pope complained two years earlier.2 sources2 sources

The school the charter announced is today's University of Coimbra, which counts its history from that day and calls itself the oldest university in the Portuguese-speaking world. Yet the charter put it in Lisbon. Over the next 247 years it moved between the two cities five times, and it settled on Coimbra's hill only in 1537.3 sources3 sources

The first universities had grown up in France and Italy. Castile, Portugal's neighbour, had several: Salamanca dated from 1218, and Palencia, Murcia and Seville also had schools. The Portuguese one came after those and just before Lérida, in the Crown of Aragon. Portuguese students and teachers meanwhile went to Castile, France and Italy.2 sources2 sources

Dinis had his own reasons to want one. Since 1266 the crown had been in conflict with the Portuguese bishops, most of whom had left for the papal court, and king and kingdom had been under a papal interdict since 1267. In 1289 the two sides signed a general settlement in Rome, the concordat of 40 articles. A school approved by the pope would also train the lawyers and clerks the crown needed.1 source1 source

The first step came from the Church. On 12 November 1288 a letter to Pope Nicholas IV was drawn up at Montemor-o-Novo, in the Alentejo, where the king had been at the start of the month and probably still was. It was signed by the heads of three of the kingdom's great monasteries, Alcobaça, Santa Cruz de Coimbra and São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon, by the priors of the collegiate churches of Guimarães and Santarém, and by the rectors of twenty-two parish churches.2 sources2 sources

The king, they told the pope, had agreed. They would pay the salaries of the doctors and masters out of the revenues of their monasteries and churches, and they asked him to confirm the arrangement and protect the work. No bishop signed. Historians put that down to the long quarrel between crown and bishops, then in its last stage.2 sources2 sources

The churches were not a random group. Maria Helena da Cruz Coelho and her co-authors point out that all twenty-two parishes were under royal patronage, mostly in the towns of the centre and south, and were usually headed by the king's own clerics. The money was to come from the Church, but the king's influence ran through the institutions that would pay for the school.1 source1 source

The pope's answer came from Orvieto, in central Italy, on 9 August 1290, addressed to the community of masters and students of Lisbon. Nicholas IV approved the school Dinis had created and the church revenues that funded it, and granted it privileges.2 sources2 sources

Empty houses in Lisbon were to be let to students at a fair rent, set by two clerics and two laymen, as at Paris and Bologna. The city's officials had to swear to respect the safety of the school's people and goods. Masters who held church livings were excused from living in their parishes. Masters, students and servants of the school answered to church courts.2 sources2 sources

Students of the four faculties, arts, canon law, civil law and medicine, would receive their degrees, once their masters approved them, from the Bishop of Lisbon, or from the vicar when the see was vacant. They could then teach in any other school without a further examination, except in theology.2 sources2 sources

The bull followed a run of letters from Nicholas IV that put the settlement of 1289 into effect and lifted the interdict. Coelho, Fernandes and Vilar argue that the founding of the school cannot be separated from that settlement, and that the pope did not separate them either.1 source1 source

The school's first home was at the Pedreira, on the western edge of medieval Lisbon, in a newly built-up district near the Franciscan and Trinitarian convents where the Bairro Alto would rise two centuries later. Dinis had houses built there for it. By 1303 he was giving the houses away for another use, and the university never went back to that side of the city.1 source1 source

In 1308 the king moved the Estudo Geral to Coimbra, which the documents of the time call “locus magis accomudus et conueniens”, a more suitable and convenient place. It was a middling city, quieter than Lisbon, with a bishop and a cathedral school, the monastery of Santa Cruz with its library and scriptorium, and friars who could teach theology. It lay on the road from Lisbon to Braga, by a river navigable to the sea.1 source1 source

In Coimbra the school went up the hill. Dinis seems to have given it buildings of its own near the royal palace in the walled upper town, the Alta, where the court had lived until the reign of Sancho II and where many houses now stood empty. Coelho and her co-authors call purpose-built premises a pioneering step in Europe. Their site now lies within the university's General Library.2 sources2 sources

In 1309 Dinis gave the school a great charter of privileges, which some historians count as its first statutes. It provided for rectors and for conservators, officials who defended the school's rights, and set up a panel of four, two named by the town council and two by the students, to fix fair rents for student lodgings. Other grants gave the students their own butchers, bakers and wine sellers and let them bring food into the city without paying tolls.1 source1 source

The privileges settled things on paper but not in the streets. Townspeople resented the students' rights over housing, food and justice, which cut into the powers of the town's own rulers. In 1338 Afonso IV, Dinis's son, sent the school back to Lisbon. He said he spent long winters in Coimbra, when the school was busiest, and wanted the students and their brawls and noise away from his palace.1 source1 source

In 1354 Afonso IV moved it back to Coimbra. Nobody knows exactly why; the disruption after the Black Death and fresh trouble with Lisbon's residents have both been suggested. In 1377 King Fernando took it to Lisbon again, claiming that masters from other kingdoms would come to teach only if it were in the capital. This time it stayed for 160 years.2 sources2 sources

The gates it named all faced east, so the students' quarter lay around Alfama and the slopes below the castle. Classes were held in the houses of the Moeda Velha, the old mint, on the eastern edge of the city. In 1431 Prince Henry, later known as Henry the Navigator, gave the school its own houses in the parish of São Tomé, below the castle, and its first known statutes date from the same year.1 source1 source

Around 1503 King Manuel moved it again, to a larger building beside the old road to São Vicente de Fora. The road took the name of the Escolas Gerais, and the building was the school's last Lisbon home.1 source1 source

The last move had been ten years in the making. In 1527 João III and his court came to Coimbra fleeing plague in Lisbon and Almeirim. The king then had the Augustinian monastery of Santa Cruz reformed, and in March 1537 a bull of Pope Paul III recognised the colleges set up there by the friar Brás de Braga as a studium generale.1 source1 source

Early in 1537 the king ordered the Lisbon university to move, in the middle of the academic year, taking its members by surprise. It reached Coimbra that spring. Teaching began on 2 May with a formal lecture at Santa Cruz by Francisco de Monçon, a professor of theology. With no building of its own, the school was split between the rector's house and rooms lent by the monastery.1 source1 source

On 13 October 1537 the university entered the alcáçova, the old royal palace at the top of the hill, which had been the residence of Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal, from 1131. The arrangement was meant to be temporary, and plans for new school buildings by Santa Cruz came and went. The whole university was gathered in the palace only in October 1544, a month after João III gave it new statutes.2 sources2 sources

Some of the move took longer still. From late November 1537 the rector could grant degrees in civil law and medicine by royal authority, but degrees in canon law and theology were suspended until papal permission arrived in February 1539. Pimentel dates the legal reconstitution of the university in Coimbra to that point.1 source1 source

Lisbon was left without a university. Higher studies returned to the capital only from the end of the eighteenth century, in schools and institutes that came together in 1911 and 1930 in two universities, now merged as the University of Lisbon. Its history page starts in 1288: it was in Lisbon, it says, that the first Portuguese university was born that year, before its transfer to Coimbra in 1537.1 source1 source

In 1597, with Philip II of Spain ruling Portugal as Philip I, the crown sold the palace to the university. Pimentel calls that year the birth certificate of the Paço das Escolas, the Palace of the Schools. The university took care to keep the building's old status and privileges as a royal palace.1 source1 source

The university grew around the palace. After João III's reforms it gained more than twenty residential colleges, built as cloistered courtyards with their own chapels, on the hill and along the new Rua da Sofia, which cut through the lower town from Santa Cruz. The Colégio das Artes taught Latin and the humanities as a preparation for university courses; one of its first teachers was the Scottish humanist George Buchanan.2 sources2 sources

The palace changed with it. A grand entrance, the Porta Férrea or Iron Gate, went up in 1633. Between 1717 and 1728, in the reign of João V, the university built a Baroque library, the Joanina, and in 1728 a new clock tower replaced the one put up in the courtyard in 1561. ICOMOS, the body that advises UNESCO on heritage sites, links the library to the university's opening to the Enlightenment, when it bought scientific books and mathematical instruments abroad.1 source1 source

The Joanina holds about 60,000 books printed between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and a portrait of João V by Domenico Duprà dominates its main floor. It was the university's library until the first half of the twentieth century.1 source1 source

In 1772 the Marquis of Pombal, chief minister of King José I, gave the university new statutes. They created faculties of mathematics and natural philosophy and reformed the teaching of medicine, and the university built a chemistry laboratory, an astronomical observatory, a botanical garden, a natural history gallery, a physics cabinet and a press. The Jesuits' college, empty after the order was expelled in 1759, became the centre of the new sciences.3 sources3 sources

In the 1940s, under the Estado Novo dictatorship, buildings around the palace were demolished and a large University City of new faculty buildings went up on the hill, closely related to the University of Lisbon's new campus, planned at almost the same time. After the return of democracy in 1974, and especially since 2000, the university has spread beyond the Alta and the Rua da Sofia.1 source1 source

On 22 June 2013, at its session in Cambodia, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed the University of Coimbra – Alta and Sofia on the World Heritage List. The bid had begun, in a different form, in the early 1980s. The listed property has two parts: 29 hectares of the Alta, around the palace and the colleges on the hill, and 6.5 hectares along the Rua da Sofia, inside a buffer zone of 81.5 hectares.3 sources3 sources

The committee's reasons were about influence as much as buildings. Coimbra trained the elite for all the territories under Portuguese rule and shaped the institutions and architecture of universities across the Portuguese-speaking world. Its city and university, the committee said, are so closely bound that the city's architecture reflects the university's functions. ICOMOS had recommended that the bid be referred back to Portugal until the site and its wider setting were better protected; the committee inscribed it anyway.2 sources2 sources

The university is no longer confined to the hill. By its own count it has eight faculties spread across the city and more than 22,000 students. In 2013 ICOMOS counted about 16,000 students using the Alta and some 500,000 tourists a year.2 sources2 sources

Two universities look back to the school. Coimbra counts its history from Dinis's charter of 1290; the University of Lisbon's history page starts with the Lisbon school of 1288. Coelho, Fernandes and Vilar treat it as one institution, founded between 1288 and 1290, that wandered between the two cities for almost a century, at the mercy of quarrels with townspeople and the wishes of kings.3 sources3 sources