Going to School in 1280: From the Madrasa to Paris

Going to school in 1280: in 1268 or 1269, a family left the town of Harran by night with their books on a cart, because they had no animals to pull it. The enemy nearly caught them, and the cart got stuck. The boy on that road, about six years old, would one day sit in his father’s teaching chair. This film follows a student’s life in about 1280, in two systems of learning: the madrasas of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, and the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford. In one, a student might be paid to study; in the other, he usually paid. It compares the bread, the rooms, the fees, the books, the teachers and the exams: the waqf endowment and the Mustansiriyya’s pay scale, the circle, the disputation and the ijaza, the student guilds of Bologna, the masters’ guild of Paris, the pecia system for copying books, Arabic texts in Latin, the Paris condemnations of 1277, and what a graduate could become. The guide is the life of Ibn Taymiyya, from the cart in 1269 to his father’s chair in 1284. The film is honest about its limits: the cart story comes from a biography written about seventy-five years later; some figures come from later chroniclers; the Bologna exam years are later rules; the story of Roger Bacon’s jail is doubted. Women appear only where a source names them. Adults only; no deity, prophet or saint is pictured. Follow the full route, east to west (The World of Wayward):    • Start Here: The 1270 Silk Road Journey (Ea...   The novel behind this series is Wayward, a trilogy set along this road. Trailer:    • WAYWARD | Epic Silk Road Historical Fictio...   Part of Silk Road Cities, documentaries on life along the Silk Road around 1270. Watch the series:    • Silk Road Cities   Chapters 0:00 A Cart on the Road, 1269 1:54 Bread and an Endowment 3:36 The Circle and the License 5:34 A Guild of Students 7:50 Books and Dangerous Ideas 10:20 What a Graduate Became Sources Primary and scholarship: Ibn Abd al-Hadi’s al-ʿUqud al-durriyya (a biography of Ibn Taymiyya); the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles on Ibn Taymiyya and Robert Kilwardby; Fordham Medieval Sourcebook, Robert de Courçon’s statutes for the University of Paris (1215); Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis; Rait, Life in the Medieval University; Muslim Heritage articles on the Mustansiriyya of Baghdad; The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 2; English Wikipedia articles on madrasas, waqf, ijaza, the medieval university, the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford, Merton College, Robert de Sorbon, the pecia system, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, the Condemnations of 1210 to 1277, the Toledo School of Translators, Gerard of Cremona and al-Nawawi. Several sources are encyclopedia articles or later chroniclers reported by modern writers, so figures are attributed and dates are rounded where sources differ. The Wayward trilogy These films grew out of the Wayward trilogy, historical novels by Fred Suh set on these roads around 1270. The books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/6502032990?... Music (YouTube Audio Library): “Tiburtina” by Schwartzy; “Sleep Music No. 1” by Chris Haugen; “From Here On In” by Everet Almond; “Jomon Grove” by The Mini Vandals; “Inner Outer” by Lish Grooves; “Curse Of Old” by Density & Time; “Rain Over Kyoto Station” by The Mini Vandals. AI disclosure Narration: AI voice (Kokoro). Images and short clips: AI-generated (Google Flow); maps and diagrams: drawn for this film. These are illustrations, not photographs or archival footage, and were reviewed for historical accuracy. Corrections are welcome in the comments. Subscribe for more of the 13th-century Silk Road:    / @wayward-trilogy   Topics: medieval education, madrasa, medieval university, Ibn Taymiyya, University of Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Mustansiriyya, ijaza, Paris condemnations of 1277 #MedievalHistory #SilkRoad #Madrasa