450 Years of Leiden University: Famous People

Leiden University was founded in 1575 and is the oldest university in the Netherlands. The university has seven faculties (six in Leiden and one in The Hague), with 33.701 students enrolled in 2025. Leiden University has known famous scientists from the past. The question is, do you know them if you are not a scientist? This fourth blog discusses: Famous people.

Brief history of Leiden University

The history dates back to the time of the Spanish Netherlands. At that time, the inhabitants of the 17 Dutch provinces attended the Catholic University of Leuven, the predecessor of the current one. Because the Eighty Years' War had broken out, students from the Northern Netherlands were refused admission. There was therefore a need for a replacement university where these students could go. William of Orange He founded this institution in Leiden in 1575. He chose Leiden because the city had been besieged for a year during the Relief of Leiden but had not surrendered to the Spaniards. In gratitude for this, he gave Leiden the first Dutch university. There is another story regarding the founding of Leiden University. According to tradition, the people of Leiden were allowed to choose between 1. not paying taxes for a year, or 2. a university because of their resistance to the Spaniards during the Eighty Years' War. Is this an urban legend or the true story? That is the question. The university was funded with assets belonging to Catholic clergy that had been confiscated by the Sea Beggars and rebels. In 1582, King Philip II is said to have declared that he considered anyone who had studied or was studying at Leiden University to be a heretic. The university's first building was a monastery, but after two years the university moved to the Rapenburg and has been located there at its current site since 1581. In 1616, this building, a former monastery, burned down and was replaced by the Academy Building, which is still in use today. Initially, one could study theology, medicine, and law at the university, as well as philosophy, literature, mathematics, and the seven liberal arts (such as grammar and astronomy). In principle, this was fairly standard for a university at the time. There was also a fencing school in Leiden, and the Leiden Botanical Garden was established, where a large plant collection was created. Leiden University enjoyed considerable prestige in both the Netherlands and Europe. Examples of individuals who studied at the university include Justus Lipsius, Josephus Justus Scaliger, Hugo Grotius, Gerard Vossius, Herman Boerhaave, Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Pieter Zeeman, and Hendrik Lorentz. Marie Curie and Albert Einstein also attended the university. Since 2012, Leiden University has collaborated with Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam. Since 1998, the university has also been located in The Hague, under the name Campus The Hague.  

Josephus Justus Scaliger

Josephus Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) was a sixteenth-century French Protestant humanist, poet, polemicist, and professor at Leiden University, succeeding Justus Lipsius. He was the first to extend the concept of classical history to include ancient Jewish, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian history and was a founder of chronology. In this, he followed the example of the English monk Bede and was a predecessor of James Ussher. He raised the standard of teaching classical philology and biblical studies in Leiden. Josephus Justus Scaliger was born in France as the tenth child and third son of the humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger and Andiette de Roques Lobejac. He was raised Catholic but converted to Protestantism. Later, he worked in Switzerland. From 1590 to 1593, he was a private tutor in Preuilly-sur-Claise for the Chasteigner de la Roche-Posay family. Subsequently, he was urgently invited to come to Leiden for two years, where in 1593 he was offered a chair at the young University of Leiden for a very high salary (1200 guilders per year), as successor to Justus Lipsius, who had left in 1591.

(In 1940, a summer stamp was issued bearing the likeness of Scaliger. The designer was Hubert Levigne, and the stamp was issued by Joh. Enschedé en Zonen. The summer stamps were first issued in 1935. Every year, a series was issued with a surcharge for Social and Cultural work. In the second half of the 1930s and early 1940s, the summer stamps were a portrait gallery of famous Dutch people, likely to emphasize national identity. In 1940, Van Gogh; Potgieter, literary scholar; Camper, physician; Jan Steen; and Scaliger, one of the founders of modern chronology.) Scaliger was an irritable man who wrote venomous remarks in the margins of books by colleagues. As a person, therefore, he was not considered likeable by some, but he did elevate research in Leiden by emphasizing the importance of a broad knowledge of the ancient languages. He did not have to give lectures, but taught working groups he hosted at home, consisting of specially selected outstanding students. From 1593 to 1594, this took place in a house in the middle of the Schoolsteeg. Possibly as early as 1594, but in any case from 1597, Scaliger lived in a large house on the Breestraat, now numbers 111-113, opposite the steps of the Town Hall.

(On Friday afternoon, January 20, 2012, at 4:00 PM, a memorial stone in memory of Josephus Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) was unveiled at the building at Breestraat 113 in Leiden. The unveiling was performed by Professor Nicolette Mout, Emeritus Professor of General History at Leiden University, who also delivered a short speech at the ceremony. The memorial stone was placed on the facade of the Van Stockum bookstore (which has since moved out of this building) at Breestraat 113, opposite Leiden City Hall.) Scaliger was also an antiquarian. He owned a collection of natural history items containing a number of remarkable objects. One of those items was a butterfly from Mauritius, which was visited by a Dutch expedition in 1598. It is the citrus butterfly which is found only on Mauritius. At the end of his life, Scaliger donated his collection to the collector Bernardus Paludanus (1550 – 1633). Scaliger was regarded as one of the greatest scholars of his time. Scaliger never returned to France and died in Leiden on January 21, 1609. After his death, Scaliger bequeathed all his manuscripts and books in Oriental languages ​​to the University LibraryThe books in other languages ​​such as Latin, Greek, Dutch, and French were auctioned. To this day, this donation forms the core of the collection.

Nowhere else in Europe was education in classical and Oriental languages ​​provided at such a high level. Until the end of his life, he was involved in polemics with Jesuits, who regarded his textual criticism of the Bible as an attack on the Roman Catholic faith.  

Jan Jonston

Jan Jonston (1603–1675) was a Polish scholar and physician, a descendant of Scottish nobility. In 1632, he became a Doctor of Medicine in Leiden. Jonston assembled a large collection of foreign animals and published from 1649 to 1653. He wrote a four-volume work, the 'Historiae naturalis': the first volume in 1649 on fish, the second volume in 1650 on birds, the third volume in 1652 on tetrapods, and the fourth volume in 1653 on insects and snakes.  

Peter Simon Pallas

Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811) was a Prussian naturalist, zoologist, botanist, geologist, and explorer. Peter Simon Pallas was the son of a professor of surgery. He initially took private lessons but later attended medical lectures at the University of Halle and the University of Göttingen. In 1760, he continued his studies at Leiden University, where, at the age of 19, he obtained his doctorate in medicine with the publication Of hostile living beings within living beings. After his studies, Pallas traveled through the Netherlands and Great Britain, where he expanded his knowledge of medicine. He settled in The Hague, where he established a system for the classification of animals. Here he also wrote Miscellanea Zoologica (1766), in which he provided descriptions of various vertebrates that had not previously been scientifically described. He based this work on earlier findings in Dutch museum collections.

In 1767, Pallas was by Catherine the Great invited to become a professor at the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg. Pallas accepted this invitation and led an expedition to Siberia between 1769 and 1774 to collect natural history specimens. He visited the northern part of the Amur, the Caspian Sea, the Urals, and Lake Baikal. Between 1793 and 1794, he led a second expedition, this time to Southern Russia, where he visited the Black Sea and Crimea. In the course of his research, Pallas discovered many new species of mammals, fish, birds, and insects, and collected many plants and butterflies. Pallas described in his work 'Journey through various provinces of the Russian Empire' (1771) for the first time a number of new species of butterflies, including the tsarenmantel (Argynnis laodice)This butterfly was first captured by Pallas during an expedition to Siberia and described in 1771. In 1772, Pallas was alerted to a 700 kg chunk of metal found in the vicinity of the city of Krasnoyarsk. Pallas had the heavy object brought to Saint Petersburg. After various analyses of the metal, it turned out to be a new type of stony-iron meteorite. Since then, this type of meteorite has been called pallasite.  

Niels Stensen

The Deen Niels Stensen (1638 – 1686), best known by his Latinized name Nicolaus Steno, was an anatomist, natural scientist, geologist, and a beatified bishop. He was one of the first to discover the function of the parotid gland and described the heart as an ordinary muscle. Furthermore, Steno formulated four principles regarding stratigraphy, the order in which rock layers are formed and occur. Steno eventually concluded that faith and science are difficult to reconcile and became a champion of the faith. He was appointed bishop and sent to Northern Germany. After studying medicine in Denmark, he left for Leiden, where he studied and conducted research. On December 4, 1664, Niels Stensen was awarded the doctorate by Leiden University in absentia. in absentia with honors awarded (a unique event in the history of the University). His degree was sent by post to his lodgings in Paris. He had various interests, for example his skills in dissection (= investigating something by completely breaking it down into parts, the dissection of a body, cutting open a corpse). He examined butterflies and flies under a microscope, among other things. In October 1666, two fishermen caught an enormous shark near Livorno. Steno examined the head and published his findings in 1667. While examining the shark's teeth, Steno noticed that they bore a strong resemblance to fossilized (as it later turned out) shark teeth found in the mountains. At the time, these were called glossopetrae or “tongue stones.” Pliny the Elder had stated that these stones had fallen from the sky or the Moon. Others claimed that fossils grew naturally in rocks. However, Steno offered the explanation that the glossopetrae resembled shark teeth because they came from the mouths of dead sharks from the past, buried in mud and sand that later dried out. To explain the difference in composition between the teeth of living sharks and tongue stones, Steno hypothesized that the formation of fossils altered the composition without this being outwardly visible. This can be seen as an early precursor to particle theory: matter consists of extremely small particles that are interchangeable. At the time of Steno's discoveries, the definition of a fossil differed from the current one. Back then, all excavated objects were called fossils, including crystals, ores, and petrified remains of past life (fossils in the modern sense of the word). Steno noticed that rocks contained substances that had not formed within the rock itself, but must have ended up there during or after the rock's formation. This led to the theory of sedimentary processes, which Steno described in 1669 in the work *De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus*, intended as an introduction. Because Steno increasingly valued religion over science, he left it at this introduction and never wrote the full work on the subject. Steno theorized that if a solid object is surrounded by another solid object (for example, a fossil by sediment), the surrounding object takes on the shape of the enclosed object. From this, Steno concluded that fossils and crystals must have become petrified before the surrounding rock was formed. If a “tongue stone” had grown within a rock, the tongue stone would have molded itself to the rock, like a root growing into a crack and filling it. Steno theorized that the latter was the case with the formation of veins and crystals in rock. Rock veins form when fluids percolate through fissures in rock, which subsequently close up with precipitating minerals. The crystals that grow in this way take on the shape of the fissure. Old University Library, exhibition on Niels Stensen through March 31, 2025: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/nieuws/2025/02/tentoonstelling-eert-niels-stensen-pionier-in-geneeskunde-en-geologie?   To be continued..... Sources used: With thanks to the images by butterfly philatelist Vladimir Kachan and the article in Thema, February 2025 by NVTF. With thanks to Frans Hemelop for his beautiful designs of Leiden personal stamps, which are considered works of art: https://hemelop.nl/ Heritage Leiden and surroundings  

 

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450 years of Leiden University: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/dossiers/450-jaar Leiden University Top 450: https://top450.universiteitleiden.nl/ Alumni (incl. Guide, 45 milestones from 450 years) of Leiden University: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/alumni 450th anniversary edition of Mare, number 17/452025: https://www.mareonline.nl/assets/Uploads/Documenten/eff31e6eaf/Mare-17-48_Special.pdf Dies Natalis Celebration (program and report) on February 7, 2025: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/agenda/extra/2025/02/dies-natalis-2025# https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/nieuws/2025/02/dies-natalis-2025 Leiden celebrates – 450 years of parades, through March 2, 2025 (worth seeing and lots of posters): https://www.lakenhal.nl/nl/verhaal/450-jaar-optochten Leiden University Library: https://www.bibliotheek.universiteitleiden.nl/ Old University Library, exhibition about Niels Stensen through March 31, 2025: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/nieuws/2025/02/tentoonstelling-eert-niels-stensen-pionier-in-geneeskunde-en-geologie? Previous blogs 450 years of Leiden University: https://www.postzegelblog.nl/tag/450-jaar-universiteit-leiden/