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Founding
Founding of Palacký University Olomouc
Czech university
- 1573
- Europe
Founding
Czech university
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Palacký University Olomouc (Czech: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci) is the oldest university in Moravia and the second-oldest in the Czech Republic. It was established in 1573 as a public university led by the Jesuit order in Olomouc, which was at that time the capital of Moravia and the seat of the episcopacy. At first it taught only theology, but soon the fields of philosophy, law and medicine were added.
After the Bohemian King Joseph II's reforms in the 1770s the university became increasingly state-directed, and today it is a public university. During the Revolution of 1848 university students and professors played an active role on the side of democratisation. The conservative king Francis Joseph I closed most of its faculties during the 1850s, but they were reopened by an act of the Interim National Assembly passed on 21 February 1946. This act also extended the name from University of Olomouc to Palacký University Olomouc, after František Palacký, a 19th-century Moravian historian and politician.
The city of Olomouc has the highest density of university students in Central Europe, with around 25,000 university students (including those at Moravian College Olomouc), compared to a population of 100,000 inhabitants. Notable people who have taught, worked and studied at the university include Albrecht von Wallenstein and Gregor Mendel.
The university is the oldest in Moravia and the second oldest in the Czech Crown lands. Its foundation was an important element of the Counter-Reformation in Moravia, as the church of Rome began its fight back against Protestantism. Roughly 90% of the population of the Czech lands was already Protestant by the time the Habsburgs took over the throne in 1526. The Protestant Hussites were working for the provision of universal education, which was a particular challenge for the Catholics. By the middle of the century there was not a single town without a Protestant school in the Czech lands, and many had more than one, mostly with two to six teachers each. In Jihlava, a principal Protestant center in Moravia, there were six schools: two Czech, two German, one for girls and one teaching in Latin, which was at the level of a high / grammar school, lecturing on Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Rhetorics, Dialectics, fundamentals of Philosophy and fine arts, as well as religion according to the Lutheran Augustana. With the University of Prague also firmly in hands of Protestants, the local Catholic church was unable to compete in the field of education. Therefore, the Jesuits were invited, with the backing of the Catholic Habsburg rulers, to come to the Czech lands and establish a number of Catholic educational institutions, foremost the Academy in Prague and the one in Olomouc.
The Olomouc bishop Vilém Prusinovský z Víckova invited the Jesuits to Olomouc in 1566. The Jesuits established a monastery, and then progressively established the Gymnasium (school) , the academy, the Priest Seminary, and the Seminary of St. Francis Xavier For Poor Students.
The college was promoted to university status in 1573, and thence the Latin: Collegium Nordicum and the Academy of Nobility were established. The university was closed during plagues in 1599 and 1623, and during the Bohemian Revolt in the Thirty Years' War. It was ransacked by the Swedish Empire's armies.
In the Counter-Reformation and succeeding decades, it became significantly influential as the Jesuit grip loosened. In 1773, after the dissolution of the Jesuit order, it was turned into a secular institution run by the State. In the end, it was separated from the Olomouc episcopal institutions and relocated to Brno in 1778. It returned to Olomouc four years later, its status downgraded to that of a lyceum.
In 1827 it once again was promoted to University status. The short life of this renamed "Francis University" (Franzens-Universität Olmütz, 1827 – 1860) perhaps eclipses its high scientific standard (especially in natural sciences, law and medicine) and its political importance, particularly in the "Springtime of Peoples" during the Revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg areas, when it became the centre of the struggle for national revival in Moravia. The Habsburg régime retaliated by closing most of the university in the 1850s. Olomouc's university was fully re-established in 1946, inaugurating the modern era of the university.
Education in Olomouc had a long tradition before the Jesuit College obtained University status. As early as 1249 a school was established by the Bishop of Olomouc Bruno ze Šamberka. Lectures covered grammar, dialectic, rhetoric and liturgy. The first Master, Bohumil, was appointed in 1286. In 1492 the first college dignitary, Heřman, was appointed.
It is well known that Moravia was in the middle of the 16th century the land of the greatest religious freedom, and therefore it was famous in both the religious and laical European society as the den of the heresy. The majority of nobility was non-catholic, the schools and printing-shops established by the Unity of Bretheren were flourishing; on the other hand there were cries of Olomouc Catholic Bishops and of catholic kings Ferdinand and Maximilian about the bad standing of diocese, about the lack of clergy-men and their bad morals, disorders in schools as well as in monasteries, lack of financing etc.
— V. Nešpor, Dějiny university olomoucké
The college was rebuilt by Bishop Marek Khuen z Olomouce in 1564 to provide lectures both to public administrators and to prospective teachers. His successor Vilém Prusinovský z Víckova invited Jesuits to Olomouc in 1566. Several education initiatives rapidly ensued in the city: it is apparent that by 1567 the Jesuits were running the college. The Olomouc episcopacy pledged to finance the college with 500 Tolars a year (the amount was raised to 2000 Tolars a year in 1570).
Jesuit instructors in Olomouc were as eager to procure converts to their religion as the Devil to pursue the soul.
On 22 December 1573 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor appointed Jan Grodecký to be Bishop of Olomouc and at the same time gave the Olomouc Jesuit College the right to award university degrees. The first rector was Hurtado Pérez (Mula, Spain 1526 – Olomouc 1594). University education itself started on 3 October 1576, when the Englishman George Warr started to lecture on philosophy. In the same year the first students were officially enrolled in the university's registry and the students were "subdued" in an admission ceremony, which was supposed to relieve them of base morals.
In 1578 the authority of the university was expanded by the creation of a special papal seminary (Latin: Seminarium Pontificium) called in Latin: Collegium Nordicum (a second Collegium Nordicum was established in Braunsberg; the one in Olomouc lasted until 1741) The previous sphere of responsibility, which had covered Silesia, Poland, Hungary and the Austrian lands as well as Moravia, was now broadened to include Germany, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The aim of the seminary was to create devoted and well-educated Catholic priests who would then return to their homelands, and there promote and protect the Catholic Church's interests and objectives.
In 1581 the university received an Imperial Privilege from the emperor Rudolf II, whereby degrees awarded by the Jesuit University had the same value as those from any comparable university. At the same time the privilege established university jurisdiction over students and professors, which meant that university members enjoyed a form of clerical immunity and could not face trial before civil courts even in respect of criminal proceedings. In 1582 the Bishop and Jesuits forced the Protestant school in Olomouc to close. Meanwhile, the bishop, Stanislav Pavlovský, called for the establishment of faculties of law and medicine. He was able to convince the rector, Bartoloměj Villerius, to support his proposal. Later in the 1588 the emperor Rudolf II, in a document written in Czech, gave his support for establishment of all these faculties; however the idea failed at the time due to lack of finance. In 1590 the university had about 600 students, while by 1617 their number exceeded one thousand. In the era before the Battle of White Mountain Olomouc University was composed of a grouping of connected and comprehensive colleges and dormitories. The areas taught were humaniora (preparation for university-level studies), philosophy (liberal arts), and theology.
Rudolf II was succeeded in 1612 by his brother, the Emperor Matthias who sought to install the fiercely Catholic Ferdinand of Styria on the Bohemian throne (which was conjoined with that of the March of Moravia), but in 1618 the Protestant Bohemian and Moravian noblemen, who feared losing religious freedom (two of the Protestant churches being already forcibly closed), started the Bohemian Revolt. Consequently, the Jesuits were driven out of Olomouc and the university ceased operating, only to be restored in 1621 after the revolt was crushed. The Jesuits and the university benefited considerably from the defeat of Protestants: most of the Protestant nobles were either executed or expelled after the Revolt and their properties were confiscated. Prior to the Revolt the university was mostly funded from donations of patrons. However, the new Emperor Ferdinand II gave the university several substantial estates which he had confiscated from the defeated rebels. Foremost among these was the manor of Nový Jičín which provided a good income. Other properties donated by the Emperor included a farm formerly owned by Jan Adam Prusínovský, a relative of the founder of the Jesuit college. From 1622 the entire education system of the Czech Crown lands was placed under Jesuit control, including even the University of Prague and the University of Wrocław (Silesia was also a Czech Crown land at the time). By 1631 the university had some 1100 students of which around thirty were annually conferred Doctor of Philosophy title. The lectures on mathematics allured so wide audience, that they eventually became open to public.
Students-at-arms
The Thirty Years' War (1618–48) prevented further development of the university. The Swedish kings wanted to destroy once and for all the bases from which the Catholic Church and the Jesuit Order drew the manpower and economic resources needed for their attempts to reintroduce the spiritual rule of Rome into the Scandinavian North. These were foremost the Jesuit College in Braunsberg, which fell into the Swedish hands in 1626, and Olomouc. The Swedes occupied Olomouc from 1642 to 1650. They plundered the university's vast library and the population of the town declined from over 30,000 to 1,675. As a result, Olomouc University's most precious relics are now in the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, including 1,142 codices made under the patronage of Bishop of Olomouc Jindřich Zdík.
After the war ended the Jesuits started an extensive construction programme, building a series of imposing Baroque buildings for the Order and University in order to advertise their newly acquired domination of the Czech lands. This was happening against the background of savage re-Catholization which, along with war and plague saw the population decline from over 3 million to some 800,000 people. Even Czech was considered heresy by the Jesuits who were burning books written in Czech: the language was gradually reduced to nothing more than a means of communication between peasants, most of whom were illiterate. The era, generally described as the Dark Age of the Czech Nation, was nevertheless a period of expansion for the Jesuit University of Olomouc: several sciences were now taught at the university, including mathematics and physics (by Jakub Kresa and Jan Tesánek), and cartography (by Valentin Stansel). Hebrew was also studied. Among notable people connected with the university at the time are the mathematician Jan Marek Marci and the historian Bohuslav Balbín.
The make-up of the university changed. Before the war the majority of lecturers were foreigners: now most of them were from Czech Crown lands. The number of students rose to 1,500 in 1727: in addition to locals there were many students from Hungary, Lusatia, Poland and Lithuania as well as from Russia.
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