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 THE GOTHIC AGE vanished, memories of old treason being lost in oblivion. A citizen of Cracow, Wirsing, even became the king's counsellor, and was appointed to an office hitherto reserved to knights—that of High Steward of Sandomiria; it was he who in 1364, when there was a great meeting of monarchs and princes at Cracow, occasioned by the wedding of the king's grand-daughter Elizabeth with the Emperor Charles IV, entertained all the monarchs then assembled with royal splendour at his own house and dismissed them with princely gifts. In 1352 the king borrowed from the rich aldermen of Cracow the sum of 60,000 groschen, Prague coinage; several years later, in 1358, a definite reconciliation between king and town took place. The king grants to the town the "great charter," conferring numerous benefits upon it, such as the revenue from the traders' and artisans' shops, from house rent, from the public scales, great and small, from the gold and silver smelting works; besides, the judiciary autonomy of the town was re-established, and all the suburbs, except Zwierzyniec, Czarna Wies, and Florencia, placed under the municipal jurisdiction. Staple-right was also granted to the town, even with the stipulation that the merchants of Sandec were not allowed to export their wares to Prussia by any other way than Cracow. In 1363 the town, in order to extend its territory, bought some of the royal possessions both within the city and without; in the same year it also gained the staple-right for wool.

Already in the Romanesque period Cracow had possessed some convent and parish schools. The Cathedral school, which was said to have existed on the Wawel ever since the reign of Boleslaus the Bold, served for the training of the clergy. Its teachers, called scholastici ("scholars"), were often promoted to the bishop's chair. Besides this, there were other schools: thus we know, e.g., that in the eleventh century there was a school attached to St. Giles' Church, in the twelfth, one connected with St. Michael's, and at its close, one at St. Florian's. In the beginning of the thirteenth century Bishop Ivo Odrowaz founded a school at Trinity Church; this, when in 1220 the parsonage