International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Andrzej Kompa
University of Łódź, Łódź, Poland; 
[e-mail]
Higher Education in Constantinople – A University or Not?
Constantinopolitan imperial school (5
th
-6
th
centuries) has acknowledgedly a significant place in 
history of education. Paradoxically perhaps, it seems to be our ‘internal knowledge’, almost completely 
unrecognized or forgotten outside the Byzantine studies. Partially, it is because of the reservations 
of the Byzantinists regarding the use term ‘university’ in relation to that 5
th
-century Theodosian 
establishment. The term is often put in the inverted commas or treated only semiseriously. And yet, as 
the role of late ancient education is still being stressed and the understanding of the problem fostered, 
it seems to be the right time to reconsider the basic question: was it a university or not? 
Reasons for hesitations are known: we do not see at the Capitol an institutional organization 
formed with the system of superiors and subordinates, there were no faculties, nor academic titles 
and diplomas. Highly individualised character of schooling shaped rather the mentor-pupil relations, 
and not the student-institution ones. And it is true, we cannot assume that the higher education in 
Constantinople ran incessantly through the centuries and that the constitutions of Theodosius the 
Younger, albeit never abrogated, remained perpetually in the legal system for more than antiquarian 
reasons. We may only suppose that the imperial school functioned untroubled until the end of 
the 6
th
century, as witnessed e.g. by John the Lydian, and to a minor degree also in the 7
th
century 
up to Justinian II (as the costly building investments were still undertaken, also the instruction of 
the future officials seem probable, in reduced scope, and maybe within the complex of the Great 
Palace). An attempt to re-establish the school was ventured by cesar Bardas in the 9
th
century, but it 
was only a century later when the fortunate imperial decisions reinvented the Byzantine university 
anew. Thus, although the continuity of education was preserved, an institutional one is something 
we cannot expect.

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With this being taken into account, the arguments that support the positive answer, recollected 
together, seem more convincing, both in number and in weight. Firstly, a failure of the initiative in 
the long run should not reduce to nothing the initiative itself, even more so the first dozen decades 
of its functioning did not encounter any major obstacles. Secondly, lack of the boards, principals 
and subordination of one professor to another, should not lead to the assumption that there was no 
academic community on spot, as there were many factors that bound the people involved together: 
the ways of employment and dismissal of the teachers, the auditoria, the customs, habits and feasts 
of the students (cf. the canons of Trullanum), the curricula for students (at least those who studied 
law). Imperial supervision and concern, careful differentiation between the public and the private 
teachers, and first and foremost the constitutions of 425, that so clearly delimitated the conditions 
of schooling are further major arguments. The specialists of different arts were united in one 
educational institution, they were classified and inscribed into general state programme. Despite 
the differences with the later medieval universities of the West, the Constantinopolitan school was a 
university, and after the decades of reluctant usage of this classification the term should be positively 
reconsidered at last.

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