The Sorbonne owes its origin and its name to Robert de Sorbonne, chaplain and confessor to Louis IX. Like so many other scholars of the same period, this priest had been compelled to rely on alms to defray the expenses of his education. Touched by miseries which he himself had shared, he established a society of secular ecclesiastics, whose function it was to give gratuitous instruction; and he petitioned the king to endow the charitable enterprise with a dwelling for those pupils who could not pay for their lodging. Nor was his request unheeded. Thanks to royal patronage he was able, in 1253, to open his college. Indigent scholars were taught for nothing; those not quite destitute of means paid five sous and a half weekly. The institution was directed by the associates, who had neither superiors nor principals. The Sorbonne, as the new College was soon to be called, was attached, like all other establishments of the kind, to the University of Paris, and the connection, throughout its long and brilliant history, never ceased. But the ties which bound it to this central institution became looser and looser as the Sorbonne increased in importance. The provisor, who after a time made the appointments in the Sorbonne, was himself elected by a jury composed of the local archdeacon, the great chancellor, the masters and the faculty of theology, the deans of law and medicine, the rector of the university, and the procurators of the “four nations” into which the university was divided. The election took place in this manner until 1524, after which the provisor was elected by the members of the college, the former jury of election being now only called upon to confirm the choice. If the Sorbonne was the great school of theology in the middle ages, it was not its cradle; theology was born with scholasticism in the ninth century. It had already nourished with Longfranc, Saint-Anselme, Abailard, and Pierre Lombard before bearing riper fruits with Albertus Magnus and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Already the court of Rome submitted questions of pure dogma to the theologians of the University of Paris, while reserving to itself all questions of canonical law. But the college founded in so humble a manner by Robert de Sorbonne was soon to become the official organ of scholastic theology; and in its bosom were discussed questions which embarrassed the Church of France and even the court of Rome. From its walls went forth the sentences, decrees, and censures which were to have force of law throughout the Catholic world.