The University of Paris came into being in 1208-1209. After twenty years of institutional development, a violent “town and gown” conflict pitted the students against the city’s bourgeois in March 1229. Numerous students were left injured by the clashes. Unable to obtain justice, the University of Paris masters and students left the capital for two years, between 1229 and 1231. Prosopographic data show that they dispersed to the Loire Valley, Picardy, Champagne, England, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. In these places, many continued to teaching or studying and thus this circulation drove the development of centres of educational such as Orléans or Palencia. The recent universities of Oxford and Toulouse also saw a rapid increase in their numbers with the arrival of these Parisian scholars. Manuscripts and institutional models travelled with the masters and students throughout Europe and so we may correspondingly affirm that the great strike of the University of Paris generated important repercussions for the emergence of European universities in the 13th century.

Biographical note
Nathalie Gorochov is Professor of Medieval History at the University Paris-Est Créteil and a member of the Centre de Recherche en Histoire Européenne Comparée. Her research focuses on the cultural, social and religious history of the Middle Ages (12th-15th centuries). She is particularly interested in the history of universities, colleges and student populations. She has published notable works such as Le collège de Navarre de son fondation (1305 au début du XVe siècle. Histoire de l’institution, de sa vie intellectuelle et de son recrutement, Paris, Editions Champion, 1997, and Naissance de l’université. Les écoles de Paris d’Innocent III à Thomas d’Heren (v. 1200 – v. 1245), Paris, Editions Champion, 2012. See is currently preparing the work Histoire culturelle de l’Occident médiéval, to be published by Hachette at the end of 2018, as well as the publication, in Presses Universitaires de Rennes, of the papers presented at the international conference organised at the University Paris-Est Créteil in 2014, entitled L’université et la ville du Moyen Age à nos jours.