<P> Hastings Rashdall set out the modern understanding of the medieval origins of the universities, noting that the earliest universities emerged spontaneously as "a scholastic Guild, whether of Masters or Students...without any express authorisation of King, Pope, Prince or Prelate ." </P> <P> Among the earliest universities of this type were the University of Bologna (1088), University of Paris (teach . mid-11th century, recogn. 1150), University of Oxford (teach . 1096, recogn. 1167), University of Modena (1175), University of Palencia (1208), University of Cambridge (1209), University of Salamanca (1218), University of Montpellier (1220), University of Padua (1222), University of Toulouse (1229), University of Orleans (1235), University of Siena (1240), University of Northampton (1261), University of Coimbra (1288), University of Pisa (1343), Charles University in Prague (1348), Jagiellonian University (1364), University of Vienna (1365), Heidelberg University (1386) and the University of St Andrews (1413) begun as private corporations of teachers and their pupils . </P> <P> In many cases universities petitioned secular power for privileges and this became a model . Emperor Frederick I in Authentica Habita (1158) gave the first privileges to students in Bologna . Another step was when Pope Alexander III in 1179 "forbidding masters of the church schools to take fees for granting the license to teach (licentia docendi), and obliging them to give license to properly qualified teachers". Hastings Rashdall considered that the integrity of a university was only preserved in such an internally regulated corporation, which protected the scholars from external intervention . This independently evolving organization was absent in the universities of southern Italy and Spain, which served the bureaucratic needs of monarchs and which Rashdall considered to be their artificial creations . </P> <P> The University of Paris was formally recognized when Pope Gregory IX issued the bull Parens scientiarum (1231). This was a revolutionary step: studium generale (university) and universitas (corporation of students or teachers) existed even before, but after the issuing of the bull, they attained autonomy . "(T) he papal bull of 1233, which stipulated that anyone admitted to be a teacher in Toulouse had the right to teach everywhere without further examinations (ius ubique docendi), in time, transformed this privilege into the single most important defining characteristic of the university and made it the symbol of its institutional autonomy...By the year 1292, even the two oldest universities, Bologna and Paris, felt the need to seek similar bulls from Pope Nicholas IV ." </P>

Who played the biggest role in creating the first universities in europe