As the fifteenth century opened Spain’s Queen Isabel authorized her chief cleric, Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros, to go to Alcala de Henares (a city that belonged to Cisneros in his role as Archbishop of Toledo) and to turn its medieval school into a modern Christian humanist university. He gathered there some of Europe’s finest scholars and one of the university’s first major successes was the publication of the Alcala (or Polyglot) Bible, an edition of the Old and New Testaments in four parallel columns printed in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic. The Alcalá Bible was seen across Europe as a major hu
manist achievement of the maturing Renaissance. The university was known as the Complutense—a variation on the Roman name (Complutum) for the city the Arabs called Al-qal’a. With Salamanca, the Complutense University at Alcala became one of the main centers of higher learning in Spain. Until 1836. In that year Minister Juan Alvarez Mendizábal nationalized most properties held by the church. As part of that social and economic upheaval the Computense University was moved to Madrid, and the historic buildings in Alcala that had served as a campus for the Complutense for centuries were prepared to be sold to an American businessman. The convecinos (inhabitants) of Alcala rallied and bought the old campus and thereby preserved the city’s university legacy.
In 1977 the University of Alcala de Henares was founded, reoccupying the old campus (paying one dollar rent per year to the convecinos) and building a new campus outside the city to house the faculties of “science and technology.” Traditional liberal arts disciplines set up shop in the historic buildings in the city center. The President’s Office (Rectorado) occupied the central building, which, not coincidentally, served as one of the models for the design of the courtyard of BYU’s JFSB. After Gre
at Britain went protestant in the sixteenth century, Catholic families there looked for places abroad to educate their children. Spain was a logical choice, and in the peninsula sprung up sc
hools for Irlandeses and Escoceses and other such believers. In the seventeenth century a school was erected in Alcala close to the rectorado for these Catholic students. BYU students now study in that building, occupied by the Alcalingua Language School.
In 2015 President Worthen and Vice President Rogers renewed BYU’s agreement with UAH and established offices in Alcalá at the Fundacíon General on Calle Imagen in the heart of the city. The Fundación building was once owned by the family of Miguel de Cervantes, and the celebrated birthplace of the author of the Quixote is across the street.