The Oldest Universities in the World in Photos

A walk through the courtyards, halls and facades of the oldest universities that still teach today, from the mosque-universities of Fez and Cairo to the medieval schools of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Britain, France and Central Europe. Each photo shows one university's historic building, and the gallery runs in order of traditional founding date, from the ninth century to St Andrews in 1413. Those dates deserve a little suspicion. Some mark the first known teaching, some a royal or papal charter, and some a date settled centuries later. Whether a medieval mosque school counts as a university is itself debated. Each caption says how its date is counted and where a claim to be oldest is disputed. Schools that flourished and then closed for good are left out. Paris, whose university was abolished in the Revolution and later re-created, stays in because its successors still use the Sorbonne, and its caption explains the break.