[62] Upon completing his course in Latin grammar, the student with the opportunity and the interest to continue his studies looked to the university. ⁽¹⁾ Commonly known as estudios generales before the seventeenth century, later as universidades, these institutions were distinguished from the grammar schools by their teaching chairs in the advanced faculties of law, medicine, and theology and the right to grant licenses or degrees of scholastic attainment -- the baccalaureate, master's license, and doctorate. Estudios particulares, or simply estudios, often rivaled the universities in size but lacked either the full complement of faculties or the right to grant academic degrees. These simple estudios included many of Spain's grammar schools which taught theology and the liberal arts in addition to Latin grammar but had no power to grant degrees, only certificates of study. In the same category were various institutions which taught all of the prescribed university subjects but could grant degrees only to certain groups, the members of one religious order, for example. ⁽²⁾

Universities in Spain, as in other European nations, began during the Middle Ages. By 1450 the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón had six estudios generales, four of which were fully operational and rather well-known. The oldest was at Salamanca, a city in the old kingdom of León in western Spain, not far from the Portuguese border. It had originated early in the thirteenth century, received the official recognition of King Alfonso X in 1248 and the sanction of the papacy in 1255, which enabled it to be known as studium generale and to grant academic degrees, the right of jus ubique docendi. ⁽³⁾ Salamanca was soon rivaled by another estudio general at the not far distant town of Valladolid, the first in the kingdom of Castile, ⁽⁴⁾ and then by others at Huesca in the kingdom of Aragón and at Lérida in the principality of Catalonia.

[63] Beyond a few basic facts, little is known about the early history of these institutions. The work of kings rather than popes, they led an uncertain existence, especially during the wars of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries The major subjects were the laws canon and civil if only because theology was not an official part of the university curriculum Salamanca for example relying upon classes offered by nearby religious convents, did not acquire a faculty of theology until 1394, more than a century after its official foundation. Pope Martin V (1417-31) expanded the number of Salamanca's theology chairs and sanctioned the theology faculty which had begun in 1411 at Valladolid with the help of King John I; nevertheless, the holy science continued to take second place to studies in law. In this respect Spain's medieval universities bore a close resemblance to their Italian counterparts, notably Bologna, upon whose government and organization they were modeled. The universities of northern Europe, Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris in particular, famous for their studies in arts and theology, were markedly different. Moreover, the latter were the universitas or corporation of masters rather than students, while the collegiate tradition, so strong in the north by the late fourteenth cenry, came slowly to the universities of Spain, never to assume the importance it would achieve in Paris or in England.

After the middle of the fifteenth century the fortunes of higher education in Spain improved decisively. At that point Spain's universities, now numbering six, were institutions at the periphery of society, far removed from the mainstream of religious and secular life. Poor in rents, low in reputation, many Spanish youths avoided them, preferring instead to study abroad: physicians at Montpellier, lawyers at Bologna, some of whom were supported by the Spanish college in that city, and theologians at Paris. ⁽⁵⁾ But in the century following the opening of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel, the universities of Spain grew in number, size, and prestige. Between 1474 and the early seventeenth century, twenty-seven new universities were established, giving Spain a grand total of thirty-three. In addition, Spaniards organized universities in their new American territories at an astonishing rate The first under Dominican auspices arose at Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola in 1538, to be followed by others in Mexico City (1551), Lima (1551), Las Charcas (1552) in what is now modern Bolivia, Bogotá (1580), and Quito (1586). Universities in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala came in the seventeenth century. In total, Spaniards of the Golden Age established or reorganized no less than forty universities, including those in Spanish-controlled territories in Europe, a record no other Europeans could match.

[64] In Spain itself, the universities, new and old, were situated almost without exception in major towns and clustered in two regions: Catalonia and Old Castile. The former, a small but populous and relatively prosperous region around Barcelona, maintained six universities by 1620. In comparison, the much larger but sparsely populated and impoverished kingdom of Aragón, lying just to the west, had only three, while the kingdom of Valencia and the Balearic Islands boasted five. The nineteen remaining universities lay within the borders of the Crown of Castile: the administrative, economic, and political heart of the Spanish empire (Map 2).

Of the nineteen only six were to be found south of the Tagus River, which runs across the middle of the peninsula, separating Andalucia, Extremadura, and much of New Castile from the northern half of the kingdom. In general, the south was a poor, backward, illiterate region. Its sparse population consisted mainly of landless peasants working for wealthy landowners who lived in the towns; industry was light, limited mainly to pottery-making and silk, while mercantile activity centered in and around Seville, gateway to the New World. Moreover, outside of Córdoba, Granada, and Seville, the south had no major administrative or ecclesiastical seat. Castile north of the Tagus, on the other hand, was a prosperous, densely populated region. Towns like Burgos and Medina de Campo thrived on the international trade in merino wool; cathedral chapters were plentiful and rich; and in the years before Philip II settled his [65] capital in Madrid, it was here that Spain's peripatetic court spent most of its time. Home for a major part of Castile's nobility and boasting a tradition of municipal support for primary and secondary schools, little wonder that the north of Castile acquired eleven new universities, more than any other region in Spain.

Accompanying the proliferation of universities in the sixteenth century was the rise of colleges within them. These institutions had existed in Spain since the creation of the College of Pan y Carbón at Salamanca in 1386, ⁽⁶⁾ but in the fifteenth century the universities had acquired only a handful of new colleges. Thereafter, they multiplied. Salamanca had only two colleges for lay students before 1500, but acquired twenty-eight in the course of the century which followed, not including those colleges the religious orders built for themselves. ⁽⁷⁾ Similarly, the University of Valladolid received six such communities in the century following the reign of the Catholic kings, while the new University at Alcalá de Henares added eight colleges to the seven created at the time of its foundation in 1508.

Modeled after the Spanish college in Bologna, the colleges were small, semiautonomous communities. Members elected their own officers and administered the rents set aside by their founders for their support. Elections to scholarships were generally handled by the scholars themselves, although in some colleges selected patrons had the right of nomination. All of Spain's colleges were semimonastic in character and strict rules regarding dress and discipline, the tenure of each scholarship, and the subjects to be studied were minutely set forth in constitutions and statutes. But other than repetition exercises and mock examinations, no organized teaching took place within the colleges. In this regard university colleges in Spain contrasted sharply with their counterparts in England and France, the reason being that while many of the colleges in the north of Europe had been designed for graduate students who later took on undergraduates as boarders, pupils, and wards, all but six of Spain's colleges were for undergraduates who were expected to attend university lectures.

Initially, the goal common to the university college in Spain was to provide poor or orphaned students with an opportunity to attend university, and toward this end most of these communities had special statutes barring students whose private income exceeded a certain level. This charitable aim was complemented by that of regional improvement; each college was generally restricted to students from specific provinces and towns. A few imposed further limitations: four were reserved for students [66] who belonged to one of Spain's military orders; two, notably San Lázaro and Santa Catalina at Salamanca, were restricted to members of the founder's family; while the College of the Conception, established in 1608 at Salamanca, required its scholars to defend the doctrine of the immaculate Conception. College founders also stipulated whether the scholars were to be laymen, tonsured or full-fledged priests, noble or plebeian; thus, Spaniards from every estate were represented in the colleges' scholarships.

Noteworthy among the host of new colleges and about which more will be said later were the six colegios mayores. ⁽⁸⁾ Four of these were at Salamanca, one was at Valladolid, and another at Alcalá de Henares. The oldest, the college of San Bartolomé, was established at Salamanca in 1401 by Diego de Anaya, Archbishop of Seville, and subsequently served as the archetype for the later foundations. ⁽⁹⁾ These included Santa Cruz (1484) at Valladolid; San Ildefonso (1508), the core of the new university at Alcalá; and the remaining three at Salamanca: Cuenca (1510); San Salvador, known as Oviedo (1517); and Santiago el Zebedeo, called del Arzobispo (1521). As in the case of San Bartolomé, the later foundations were the work of wealthy prelates.

These six colleges were distinguished from the others by their wealth, special graduation privileges which reduced examination fees for their members by as much as one-half, and the regulation that a baccalaureate was necessary for admission. Students entering these communities were therefore not young beginners but mature scholars who had already spent considerable time at university. Selected on a competitive basis, they were required to be "poor." in return they received full financial support from the college for a stipulated number of years, enabling them to remain at university and to prepare for advanced degrees. In other words, from their inception, these colleges were expected to provide their universities with an academic elite.

As in the case of the colegios mayores, prelates were the major patrons of Spain's new institutions of higher learning. The lay aristocracy hardly participated at all. Aside from the small college of Santa Catalina at Alcalá, gift of the daughter of the Counts of La Coruña, the universities at Osuna and Gandía were the only important contributions of this class. A possible explanation for this is that Spain's aristocracy had little liking for the professional character of university education. As in the case of early education, the charity of Spain's titled families failed to reach those institutions in which they had little direct interest or concern.

Royal sponsorship was also infrequent, even though the crown contributed indirectly to all new foundations by means of special tax privileges. [67] The University of Granada, founded by Charles V in 1526 to help train clerics to work in the recently conquered but as yet unconverted kingdom of Granada, was the most lavish contribution of the Habsburg kings. The colleges of the military orders at Salamanca, King's College at Alcalá for the sons of servants in the royal palace, the colleges for English and Irish Catholic refugees, and Philip II's small university within his palace-monastery at El Escorial were the only other pure royal foundations of note. In the main, the Habsburg kings, isolated from their people, often abroad and with interests leaning toward dynastic questions and the great affairs of state, left the work of university-building to groups more in touch with local and regional educational needs.

Thus it was up to the clergy to do the necessary work, and together Spain's wealthy prelates provided at least nine of the twenty-seven universities created after 1474. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Churchmen of lesser rank added another three. ⁽¹¹⁾ Armed with papal bulls, special royal confirmations and privileges, and church rents set aside for the purposes of construction, salaries, and endowment, these ecclesiastics sought to foster the development of higher education in Spain. In their founding statements the need for "science" was continually stressed, while "ignorance" was decried, but frequently little else was said. Ostensibly, their primary goal was religious; in the sixteenth century a cultured clergy and an educated laity were considered essential for the maintenance of the faith. Threatened by heresy from abroad, universities could help protect Spanish orthodoxy from within. Universities could also provide church and state with skilled, educated officials -- a goal popular in Spain, thanks to the strong influence of Erasmus. ⁽¹²⁾ Such considerations, however, fused with those of regional improvement and pride. For instance, when the town of Burgos petitioned Philip II in 1589 to expand a local college into a university, it referred to reasons why that community had first been built: "... the cardinal Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, former Archbishop of Burgos [1527-39], realizing the lack of "lettered" persons in his diocese and that for reasons of poverty and necessity the inhabitants could not leave for other universities and support themselves during their studies, ordered the establishment of a college in Burgos and left some rents so that chairs and faculties could be read." ⁽¹³⁾ In a similar vein the Dominican order, attempting in 1580 to expand [68] their estudio particular Jérez de la Frontera into a university, claimed "that the city could profit from a small university and avoid the travels, troubles, and expenses that its sons now suffer to graduate and which sometimes dissuade many worthwhile students who could otherwise benefit from such studies." ⁽¹⁴⁾ Local feeling was sufficiently strong in sixteenth-century Spain for prelates and other would-be founders to have little need to justify their projects on additional grounds. ⁽¹⁵⁾ And once one or two prelates built their universities, the others, in a competitive spirit, followed suit. During an age in which education and learning, no matter how vaguely defined, were considered beneficial to the society at large, the honor attached to university-building was an attribute few of Spain's prelates could ignore. The large number of hastily planned and inadequately financed colleges and universities that never succeeded suggests that sheer emulation and concern over one's reputation in generations to come had as much to do with the proliferation of academic institutions as other more exalted intentions and goals. ⁽¹⁶⁾

In organization and design, the universities created by the ecclesiastics differed widely from those of medieval origin. Salamanca, Valladolid, and Lérida, in line with the Italian tradition, were open, "democratic," universities in the sense that the students through their "nations" elected university officials from among their own ranks and through open competitions elected their instructors. Though colleges developed, they were never constitutionally granted control of university government and teaching. Moreover, since a majority of the students lived outside college walls, life in the older universities remained relatively undisciplined and free; continuous complaints about student riots, violations of scholarly dress, and the indiscriminate use of arms give an indication of the atmosphere that prevailed. ⁽¹⁷⁾

The laxity as well as the democratic aspects of the medieval universities contrasted with the more confined, disciplined character of the sixteenth-century institutions. Shaped more in the tradition of Paris than Bologna and founded in an age of religious upheaval and discontent, the founders sought to infuse their universities with the discipline and routine of a monastery. Their contribution was uniquely Spanish: the college-university. In this arrangement a small, endowed college reserved for selected scholarship students served as the administrative, financial, and academic core of a larger university. Officers elected by the college were [69] university officers and teaching took place within the college by instructors appointed by the college scholars. The remaining students, the majority by far, played no part in university government nor in the selection of their instructors.

The small university founded at Sigüenza in 1477 by Juan López de Medina, archdeacon of Almazán with the aid of el Gran Cardenal, Pedro González de Mendoza, was Spain's first college-university, ⁽¹⁸⁾ but the largest and most famous of these institutions was that at Alcalá de Henares. ⁽¹⁹⁾ Established by the Cardinal Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo and later Regent of Spain, the center of this university was the Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso. Its twenty-four scholars elected among themselves a rector and governing council which automatically became that of the university. Furthermore, college students generally managed to dominate the university's teaching posts. With the exception of the universities at Granada, Oviedo, Valencia, and Zaragoza, all of the universities founded in the sixteenth century were organized along similar lines, although in certain cases a religious convent replaced the college; hence the name: "convent-university." ⁽²⁰⁾

The latter aside, Spain's universities in the sixteenth century, the largest and most famous ones above all, were fundamentally secular institutions. University instructors in England had to be clergymen, but in Spain anyone who met the qualifications of age, education, purity of blood, and who was an orthodox Catholic was allowed to teach. Monks, though never barred from university chairs, nevertheless confined their activities to their own convents and monasteries, except for the few who lectured publicly in theology and the arts.

In spite of these arrangements, it would be difficult to argue that the Universities of sixteenth century Spain were wholly secular institutions. Religion and religious ceremony were integral to university life. Catholic orthodoxy was mandatory for every student and teacher, and the ideas put forth in the classrooms were scrutinized by the Inquisition's censors and spies. Students remained subject to the jurisdiction of religious authorities, specifically, the maestrescuela of the local cathedral and his subordinates. But it is also true that with the erosion of papal power in Spain after the late fifteenth century, more and more university disputes went to Crown officials. Though the maestrescuela continued to rule upon student misdemeanors and crimes, the university rector, the corregidor -- the local representative of the crown -- and the Royal Council of Castile became the universities' major courts of appeal. Disputes once directed to a bishop or the Pope went directly to the Royal Council, and this body, [70] acting as a primitive ministry of education, guarded over university statutes, initiated constitutional, curricular and disciplinary reforms, while playing an ever increasing role in the selection of university teachers and the regulation of student life.

The interest which the crown displayed in such matters was a phase in the consolidation of political and jurisdictional power in the hands of the monarchy after the reign of Catholic kings. But at the same time it was indicative of the new and growing importance which universities had acquired for the rulers of Spain. Royal interest in these institutions centered upon their role as training schools for the officials staffing Castile's militant church and the newly reorganized royal administration. These university-trained officials, commonly known as letrados, a term which applied broadly to any lettered individual and specifically to jurists, had been integral to the legal profession, the universities, and the high clergy since the Middle Ages.

Letrados had also served as royal advisors since the reign of Alfonso X (1252-84), but they did not become regular crown officials until the end of the fourteenth century. Thereafter, monarchical weakness and civil war helped to increase the number of letrados in the crown's employ; their knowledge of Roman law served as a useful weapon against local and feudal jurisdictions which challenged the royal prerogative. The Catholic kings, bent on increasing the power of the throne over and above the head of Castile's independent, rebellious aristocracy, dramatically extended the letrado's role in royal government. This policy began at the Cortes of Toledo in 1480 when the rulers initiated a series of administrative reforms which were gradually to create a new hierarchy of political power in Castile that was independent of the aristocracy, directly controlled by the monarchy, and staffed overwhelmingly by university-trained letrados. ⁽²¹⁾

What developed was a collegiate system of government, fully independent of the old government of the royal household. A number of councils with competence over matters ranging from faith to finance formed the core of this new administration. At the provincial level new legal tribunals were erected and the existing one, the chancillería at Valladolid, was expanded and given new powers. And in the towns the use of an official known as a corregidor whose job was to represent and protect royal interests at the local level was extended.

The primacy of the letrado in this new administrative hierarchy reflected the dual function of its offices; every post from the corregimiento[71] to seats on the royal councils combined judicial with administrative duties, a combination which can be traced back to the origins of monarchical government itself. Inherent in the letrado's new position in the royal government was a medieval conception of kingship in which law-giving and justice were regarded as the primary function of the monarchy. ⁽²²⁾ Moreover, it was in the financial and political interests of rulers to deploy a centralized system of justice based upon the imperial code of Justinian, which could work to supplant the existing jumble of local and feudal laws.

In order to restrict access to the new positions, the Catholic kings enacted on July 6, 1493 at Barcelona the following law:

"We order that no letrado can have any office or post of justice, investigator, or relator in our council, tribunals, or chancellories nor in any city, town, or village in our kingdom unless he has a notarized document certifying that he has studied canon or civil law for a minimum of ten years at a university in our kingdom or in foreign lands." ⁽²³⁾

In the late fifteenth century royal supervision of university life was a thing of the past. Though Alfonso X and other thirteenth-century monarchs had been active in the creation and support of the estudios generales, the chaotic and war-torn years of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries weakened royal power, enabling the papacy to gain virtual control over Spain's universities. ⁽²⁴⁾ Rome's influence reached its apogee in 1420 when Martin V issued new statutes for Salamanca, a university previously subject to royal government and control. ⁽²⁵⁾ The papacy continued to hold the upper hand until the reign of the Catholic kings, then the monarchy's newly acquired powers of clerical patronage and the need to train skilled officials of its own prompted royal intervention into university life. Much more than in the past, it was in the interests of the monarchy [72] to take a larger share in the regulation and support of higher education, a policy consistent with Queen Isabel's own interest in Renaissance learning and which apparently induced the rulers to offer financial aid to sons of noblemen and royal officials who were at university. ⁽²⁶⁾

The beginnings of this new era of monarchical control over Castile's universities can be traced to the Cortes of Toledo in 1480 when Ferdinand and Isabel ordered all letrados who had graduated after 1464 to certify the legitimacy of their academic titles before the Royal Council of Castile; increases in the student population and new positions for letrados had apparently led to false certificates of study and degrees. ⁽²⁷⁾ This order was followed by a series of decrees designed to fix matriculation and graduation fees, ensure legitimate examinations and degrees, and to end corruption in the system through which students elected their instructors. ⁽²⁸⁾ The purpose of these laws is evident: a desire by the monarchy to secure quality education in order to ensure quality churchmen and letrados. Subsequently, the royal decree replaced the papal bull as the supreme arbiter of university life, ⁽²⁹⁾ and these institutions, as in the case of universities in the north of Europe, became the servants of kings, national churches, and national culture, as popes, the Church Universal, and the international culture of the humanists were ousted from academic life.

Accordingly, Castile's rulers, no longer faced by papal opposition, were free to intervene directly into university affairs, both to regulate and to recruit. Goaded by a Cortes eager to maintain the order of university life, ⁽³⁰⁾ the crown judged academic disputes, ordered new statutes, appointed university officials, and with its own concerns in mind, demanded contributions for the royal war-chest and broke university regulations whenever it saw fit. ⁽³¹⁾ The universities, dependent upon the monarchy for judicial protection, tax exemptions, and permission to alter founding statutes, were obliged to conform to standards and rulings set independently by the crown. By mid-century royal intervention in collegiate and university affairs was routine; thus when Philip II in 1559 forbade Spanish students to study abroad except in certain "safe," Catholic areas in order to prevent the spread of heresy to his Iberian kingdoms, ⁽³²⁾ he completed a process that had been under way since the time of the Catholic kings -- the "nationalization" of education so that it could serve the interests of the state no matter what they might be. In this regard, the subsequent history of the universities of Castile was to a large degree determined by the history of the monarchy itself.

1. The best introduction to the history of Spanish universities is La Fuente, Historia de las Universidades (Madrid, 1884-89). More recent is G. Ajo y Sainz de Zúñiga, Historia de las Universidades Hispánicas (8 vols., Madrid, 1957-72). G. Reynier, La Vie Universitaire dans l'Ancienne Espagne (Paris, 1902), provides a more impressionistic account as does Alberto Jimenez, Historia de la Universidad Española (Madrid, 1971).

2. The estudio general in the Dominican convent at Jérez de la Frontera was reserved for members of this order, and after 1564 all outsiders were banned from its classes. See Sancho de Sopranis, Historia de Jérez de la Frontera (Jérez, 1965), 2: 309.

3. See V. Beltrán de Heredia, "Los Orígenes de la Universidad de Salamanca," Acta Salmanticensia 1 (1953): 16, 17, 23, 30. He claims that the university opened its doors in the year 1218-19.

4. See M. Alcocer Martínez, Historia de la Universidad de Valladolid (6 vols., Madrid, 1918-31).

5. A recent study has demonstrated that Spanish students, especially those from Aragón and Catalonia, were fairly numerous at the universities of southern France during the fifteenth century. See Jacques Verger, "Le recrutement géographique des universités francaises au début du XVe siècle d'apres les suppliques de 1403," Mélanges d'Archeologie et d'Histoire de l'écolefrancaise de Rome 82 (1970).

6. See Santiago Nogaledo Alvarez, El Colegio Menor de 'Pan y Carbón, ' primero de los Antiguos Colegios Seculares de Salamanca, 1386-1780 (Salamanca, 1958).

7. See L. Sala Balust, Constituciones, Estatutos, y Ceremonias de los Antiguos Colegios Seculares de la Universidad de Salamanca (4 vols., Madrid, 1962-66), and, by the same author, "Los Antiguos Colegios de Salamanca en la Matrícula Universitaria," Hispania Sacra 12 (1959): 131-64.

8. See below, Part III, Chap. 7.

9. See J. Roxas y Contreras, Historia del Colegio Viejo de San Bartolomé (3 vols., Madrid, 1766).

10. In the Crown of Castile prelates established the universities at Alcalá de Henares, Burgo de Osma, Oñate, Santo Tomás (Seville), and Santiago.

11. The University of Baeza was largely the work of Rodrigo López, clérigo, and his brother Pedro, a canon in Palencia. Juan López de Medina, archdeacon of Almazán, founded the University of Sigüenza with the help of Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, an Rodrigo Fernández Santaella, an archdeacon in Seville, was responsible for the University of Santa María de Jesús (Seville).

12. See Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et Espagne (Paris, 1937).

13. AGS: Patronato Royal, Cortes de Castilla, leg. 71, folio 169. The efforts of Burgos to make its Colegio de San Nicolás into a university had begun as early as 1581; cf. Beltrán de Heredia Cartulario de la Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca, 1971), 3: 574. This bid was subsequently denied by the Royal Council of Castile.

14. Sancho de Sopranis, Jérez de la Frontera, 2: 310.

15. In some instances, local feeling worked against the rise of new universities. The University of Salamanca in 1513 requested the Bishop of Malaga to help stop the establishment of an university in Seville "because it would be very harmful to the quality of the University of Salamanca, which is generally regarded as the best in the world..."; cited in Beltrán de Heredia, Cartulario, 3: 427.

16. A notable failure was the estudio at Ejea de los Caballeros in Aragón which had even managed to secure a papal bull authorizing its transformation into an estudio general.

17. See below, p. 203.

18. See I. Montiel, Historia de la Universidad de Sigüenza (2 vols., Maracaibo, 1963).

19. See Martín Esperanza, "Estado de la Universidad de Alcalá Desde Su Fundación Hasta El Año 1805," ed. A. Melgares y Marín, RABM, (1903), 8: 58 ff.; 228 ff.; 300 ff.

20. These included the universities at Almagro, Avila, El Escorial, Sahagún-Irache, Toledo, Santo Tomás in Seville, and Toledo.

21. I have described these reforms in greater detail in chapter II of my Ph.D. dissertation, "Education and the State in Habsburg Spain" (Cambridge University, 1968) (cited hereafter as "Education and the State"). See also El Conde de Torrenaz, Los Consejos del Rey Durante La Edad Media (2 vols., Madrid, 1884), and José Antonio Maravall, "Los hombres de saber o letrados y la formación de su conciencia estamental," Estudios de historia del pensamiento español (Madrid, 1967), pp. 347-80.

22. On law and the medieval monarchy, see J.A. Strayer, The Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, 1970).

23. Nueva Recopilación de las Leyes de Espana (1566) (Alcalá de Henares, 1569), Lib. III, tit. ix, ley 2.

24. See V. Beltrán de Heredia, Bulario de la Universidad de Salamanca (3 vols., Salamanca, 1966-67), esp. the Introduction.

25. These have been published in Esperabé Artega, Historia Pragmática é Interna de la Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca, 1914), vol. 1.

26. See p. 183.

27. Cortes de Toledo, 1480, ley. 108.

28. Nueva Recopilación, Libro I, tit. vi, leyes 5, 16, 17.

29. Beltrán de Heredia, Bulario, 1: 180.

30. See, for example, the Cortes de Madrid, 1528, pet. 49; Cortes de Madrid, 1534, pet. 126; Cortes de Valladolid, 1555, pets. cix, cxiii; Cortes de Madrid, 1563, pet. xxvi.

31. Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, vol. 1, publishes much of this university's official correspondence, including royal orders and pragmatics of university administration and government.

32. These were the universities in Bologna, Rome, Naples, and Coimbra.