The University of Vienna Founded
Duke Rudolf IV founded the University of Vienna on 12 March 1365, the second university in the Holy Roman Empire and the oldest in the German-speaking world still operating. Rudolf was twenty-six and in a competition with his father-in-law, the Emperor Charles IV, who had founded the university at Prague in 1348 and had excluded the Habsburg lands from the privileges of the Golden Bull. Rudolf's response was a programme of prestige — the rebuilding of St Stephen's with its south tower, the forging of the Privilegium Maius to invent an archducal title for himself, and a university. He obtained a papal charter from Urban V, and it came with a defect: the pope withheld permission for a theology faculty, which was the senior faculty of any medieval university and without which the institution was incomplete. Rudolf died months after the founding, aged twenty-five or twenty-six, and the project languished. It was rescued by his brother Albert III, who obtained the theology faculty from Urban VI in 1384, endowed the institution properly, and — decisively — recruited scholars leaving Paris during the Great Schism. Henry of Langenstein came from Paris and effectively organised it. Numbers rose further after 1409, when the German masters walked out of Prague over the reallocation of votes to the Bohemian nation, an exodus that also founded Leipzig. It became a centre of humanism under Maximilian I, and later of the medical school of Rokitansky and Skoda, and of Boltzmann, Freud and the Vienna Circle. It expelled its Jewish faculty and students in 1938 and lost roughly a third of its teaching staff. It now has some 90,000 students and counts fifteen Nobel laureates.
- Year: 1365 CE
- Category: Cultural
