History of the University in Europe. These kinds of schools were referred to as cathedral schools. There were also palace schools, which educated the young men of the ruling class on military and court tactics. These palace schools also hired chaplains to teach the young nobles about theology and language.
The change came about with Charlemagne, who understood that the only way to keep his empire flourishing was through education.
He started with the palace schools, where he expanded the curriculum to include the liberal arts. His right-hand man at instituting these sweeping reforms was Alcuin, who was an expect at all things liberal arts: the Trivium grammar, rhetoric, dialectic and the Quadrivium music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. He became the head of the palace school at Aachen, in present-day Germany, in Charlemagne instituted several enactments in the late s to continue furthering education in his kingdom.
Another significant figure in the establishment of European universities was Pope Gregory VII, who mandated the creation of cathedral schools to educate the clergy. These institutions eventually evolved into universities as we know them today.
Some of the first universities sprung up in Italy, specifically in Salerno and Bologna, and were known more as scholastic guilds than institutions of higher education. One of the first of these universities was in Salerno, which focused on medicine. The university in Bologna, which is still running today, had a more expansive curriculum, but was primarily a school of law.
