University of Constantinople

Byzantine society on the whole was an educated one. Primary education was widely available, sometimes even at village level and uniquely in that era for both sexes. Female participation in culture was high. Scholarship was fostered not only in Constantinople but also in institutions operated in such major cities as Antioch and Alexandria.^[4]

The original school was founded in 425 by Emperor Theodosius II with 31 chairs for law, philosophy, medicine, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, rhetoric and other subjects, 15 to Latin and 16 to Greek. The university existed until the 15th century.^[5]

The main content of higher education for most students was rhetoric, philosophy and law with the aim of producing competent, learned personnel to staff the bureaucratic postings of state and church. In this sense the university was the secular equivalent of the Theological Schools. The university maintained an active philosophical tradition of Platonism and Aristotelianism, with the former being the longest unbroken Platonic school, running for close to two millennia until the 15th century.^{[citation needed]}

The School of Magnaura was founded in the 9th century but did not last very long,^[6] and in the 11th new schools of philosophy and law were established at the Capitol School. The period of decline began with the Latin conquest of 1204 although the university survived as a non-secular institution under Church management until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and was refounded as the Phanar Greek Orthodox College. The primary University of the city became a madrasa (now Istanbul University), established by Mehmet II following the conquest of the city. Both of these institutions are still operational today.

Matthaios Kamariotis, lecturer of the university, became the first director of Phanar Greek Orthodox College, which was established in 1454.^[7]

The Pandidakterion refounded in 1046 is generally recognized as a "university" in that it was, like modern universities, an institution of higher learning with chairs in many fields of study, but some scholars have argued that it was not a "university" because it lacked the corporative structure of the medieval universities of Western Europe, which used the Latin term universitas magistrorum et scholarium for the communities of masters and students that came to define the institutional character of European universities.^[8][9]Nonetheless, the Dictionnaire encyclopédique du Moyen Âge also identifies the Pandidakterion founded in 425 as a "university institution".^[9]

• Byzantine Aristotelianism
• Byzantine university
• Faculty and alumni of the University of Constantinople

• Spyros Panagopoulos, "Higher Education in Byzantium" (in Greek)