Alcalá before Reform—the Decadence of a Spanish University

Abstract

A FEW miles east of Madrid on the ambling Henares River lies the town of Alcala de Henares. South of the town the land rises into high bluffs that roll away toward Cuenca. To the north the land slopes gradually up to the Guadarrama Mountains. These fields, ouce covered with the dun villages and yellow wheat of New Castile, now hold an American air base and the expanding suburbs of a new Madrid. The old Alcala, somewhat isolated from the modern automobile highway by surviving remnants of a brick town wall, has sunny narrow streets and cool shade beneath the extended second stories of the houses, supported on worn stone posts in the old Castilian fashion. The Spanish paratroopers who crowd the streets and the casual travelers who chance to visit its monuments are, for the most part, little conscious that Alcala was once a town of importance. Not for numbers, for it was never large; nor was Alcala so fortunate as its neighbor, Madrid, which received the royal favor of Philip II and became the capital of Spain. Rather, Alcala was once the seat of a famous university that filled its streets and crowded its houses with students. Its narrow precincts were pressed outwards by many convents and colleges, its market place and shops busy selling bread and books, and its officers concerned with the acquiring and spending of ecclesiastical revenue. The University of Alcala was founded, amid the vaulting expectations of the sixteenth century and under the patronage of Cardinal Cisneros, to give Spain a great center of learning that would marry humanism and theology. Living up to its founder's expectations, it eventually became overburdened with laurels as a part of the Spanish establishment. Entrenched and enduring, proud and confident of its place, Alcala came, to look back over nearly three centuries of corporate existence and intellectual accomplishment. As the accidents of time and events shaped her institutions, she came to personify many aspects of Spain before the reinvigoration of the eighteenth century.