Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/105

UNIVERSITIES AND OTHER CENTRES OF LEARNING 93 The international character of the universities gained them world-wide importance. What added stimulus and vigour must have been infused into intellectual competition by the presence, as for instance at Cologne, not only of Germans from every part of Germany, but of all the most enthusiastic students from Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Livonia, congregated together in lecture-halls and vying with one another for academic honours ! Thus, too, the greatest minds of each country were at the service of all. The University of Ingolstadt became in the very first decades of its exist- ence one of the most important in Germany, and at- tracted within its walls numbers of students from Italy, France, Spain, England, Hungary, and Poland. Eostock, even after the foundation of the Universities of Upsala in 1477 and of Copenhagen in 1479, was still considered the real university of Scandinavia, and Swedes, Norwe- gians, and Danes figured in hundreds among its students. In Cracow there was a large number both of German students and German professors. It was between Italy and Germany that this international intellectual inter- course was most considerable after the middle of the fifteenth century. German professors taught in Italian universities, and Italians were occasionally appointed to- German chairs. The number of German students at Bologna, Padua, and Pavia still remained very con- siderable after the German universities were at their zenith. It is difficult to get at trustworthy statistics of the numerical attendance at the various universities. According to one account, that of Wimpheling, the University of Cologne, towards the close of the fifteenth century, numbered 2,000 teachers and students. In that of Ingolstadt, during the first year of its opening