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 390 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE were Czechs. Universities in German cities — Vienna, Hei- delberg, Cologne, Erfurt — soon followed, however. By the close of the Middle Ages there were some eighty univer- sities in Europe. The universities were as cosmopolitan in character as was the Church itself. We find Hungarians at Paris and Place of the Polish scholars in Italy. But the students were universities supposed to have learned to speak and to under- j? * he, stand Latin in grammar schools before they came history of f J civilization to the university, where both lectures and dis- putations were conducted in the Latin language. It has been said that the medieval universities "affected the prog- ress and intellectual development of Europe more power- fully, or perhaps rather more exclusively, than any schools in all likelihood will ever do again." On the other hand, most of them are still in existence to-day as modern Euro- pean universities, and have had an unbroken, though of course changing, intellectual life since the time of their foundation. Moreover, it is doubtful if we can apply to the Greek schools of philosophy, or to the learned world of scholars at Alexandria, or to the Roman law schools, the name "universities" in the sense in which it applies to the institutions of higher learning both in medieval and modern times. We therefore owe our universities to the Middle Ages. Our word "university" is derived from the Latin univer- sitas, which in the Middle Ages at first meant any gild or Universities corporation. At first the distinctive term for an as scholastic educational institution was studium, or studium generate, if there were several faculties. It was natural for the teachers and students in a town, especially if they were unprotected foreigners far from home, to unite in a gild of scholars. And it is easy to see the resemblance between the masters of the Parisian faculties and the master- workmen in a craft gild, and between their students to whom they granted degrees and the apprentices whom the master-workmen admitted to their gild after due train- ing. At Bologna the maturer law students themselves united into universitates, chose a rector to enforce their statutes,