Editing Jagiellonian University (section)

===Golden age of the Renaissance===
[[File:Kraków.Uniwersytet Jagielloński.Collegium Maius.Aula Jagiellońska.jpg|left|thumb|The main assembly hall of the university's ''[[Collegium Maius]]'']]
For several centuries, almost the entire intellectual elite of Poland was educated at the university,{{citation needed|date=March 2021}} where they enjoyed particular royal favors. While it was, and largely remains, Polish students who make up the majority of the university's students, it has, over its long history, educated thousands of foreign students from countries such as Lithuania, Russia, Hungary, [[Bohemia]], Germany, and Spain. During the second half of the 15th century, over 40 percent of students came from the outside of the [[Kingdom of Poland]].

[[File:Kraków - Collegium Iuridicum - Brama 01.JPG|upright|thumb|The main baroque entrance to the university's ''Collegium Iuridicum'']]
The first chancellor of the university was [[Piotr Wysz]], and the first professors were [[Czech people|Czech]]s, [[German people|Germans]] and Poles, most of them trained at the [[Charles University]] in Prague. By 1520 Greek philology was introduced by Constanzo Claretti and Wenzel von Hirschberg; [[Hebrew language|Hebrew]] was also taught. At this time, the ''Collegium Maius'' consisted of seven reading rooms, six of which were named for the great ancient scholars: [[Aristotle]], [[Socrates]], [[Plato]], [[Galen]], [[Ptolemy]], and [[Pythagoras]]. Furthermore, it was during this period that the faculties of Law, Medicine, Theology, and Philosophy were established in their own premises; two of these buildings, the ''Collegium Iuridicum'' and ''Collegium Minus'', survive to this day. The golden era of the University of Kraków took place during the [[Polish Renaissance]], between 1500 and 1535, when it was attended by 3,215 students in the first decade of the 16th century, and it was in these years that the foundations for the [[Jagiellonian Library]] were set, which allowed for the addition of a library floor to the ''Collegium Maius''. The library's original rooms in which all books were chained to their cases in order to prevent theft are no longer used as such. However, they are still occasionally open to hosting visiting lecturers' talks.

As the university's popularity, along with that of the ever more provincial Kraków's, declined in later centuries, the number of students attending the university also fell and, as such, the attendance record set in the early 16th-century wasn't surpassed until the late 18th century. This phenomenon was recorded as part of a more general economic and political decline seen in the [[Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth]], which was suffering from the effects of poor governance and the policies of hostile neighbors at the time. In fact, despite a number of expansion projects during the late 18th century, many of the university's buildings had fallen into disrepair and were being used for a range of other purposes; in the university's archives, there is one entry which reads: 'Nobody lives in the building, nothing happens there. If the lecture halls underwent refurbishment they could be rented out to accommodate a laundry'. This period thus represents one of the darkest periods in the university's history and is almost certainly the one during which the closure of the institution seemed most imminent.