Salamanca University
Salamanca University was founded in 1218 by Alfonso IX and soon became
Spain's most important university.
Internationally its reputation grew rapidly such that within 30 years Pope
Alexander IV proclaimed it equal to Oxford, Paris and Bologna, the greatest
universities of the day and theories formulated here were later accepted as fact
throughout Europe.
Its most important contributions were to the development of international law
and the astronmy faculty provided guidance to Columbus in anticipation of his
forthcoming voyages of discovery.
Under the Catholic Monarchs the University continued to flourish and it was a
woman professor, Beatriz de Galindo, who tutored Queen Isabel in Latin.
In the sixteenth century it was powerful enough to resist the orthodoxy of
Felipe II's
Inquisition but freedom of thought was finally stifled by the extreme
clericalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During these dark times
books were banned for being a threat to the Catholic faith, and mathematics and
medicine disappeared from the curriculum. Under the Peninsular War the decline
seemed complete when the French demolished 20 of the 25 colleges, and by the end
of the nineteenth century there were no more than 300 students at Salamanca
University.
Nowadays the University is not prestigious as an academic institution ranking
well behind those in Madrid, Barcelona and Sevilla but it is very important as a
Spanish language and some 30,000 students per year
learn Spanish in Salamanca, many of them from the USA.
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