About
How to read the atlas
Each mark is a school of higher learning. Its shape gives the kind of school; its colour shows the most recent event there within the trail set under the timeline. Rings spread from a school when something happens. Arrows trace secessions of masters and students, relocations and mergers.
Before the 12th century there were no universities, so the early centuries show palace, cathedral and monastic schools in the Latin west and the imperial and patriarchal schools of Constantinople. Islamic and Jewish institutions are left out of this version.
Dates
Founding dates for the oldest universities are conventions: Bologna’s 1088, Paris around 1150, Oxford around 1096. Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and the notes on each school say where historians disagree.
Status of the data
This is a working draft compiled with AI assistance. Each record is being checked against reputable published sources (official institutional histories, national biographical dictionaries, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, MacTutor and similar), and its citations are shown where found. The standard general works are Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, and Hilde de Ridder-Symoens and Walter Rüegg (eds.), A History of the University in Europe, vols. 1–3. Treat individual dates and residencies as leads.
Controls
Click a school to pause and open its history. Space plays or pauses; the arrow keys step a year, or a decade with Shift. Escape closes the selection. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan.
People
The People tab follows one person across Europe. Numbered stops trace birth, study, teaching posts, travels, exile and death in order; stops after the current year are faded, so pressing play walks the route. Teachers’ and students’ routes can be overlaid to show a lineage spreading from school to school.
Citations
Numbers in square brackets lead to the sources listed at the foot of each school or person. Events marked corrected had a date or detail changed to match the sources; unverified means no reputable source was found yet; disputed means sources disagree.