Leiden University

Leiden University is a public research university in Leiden, in the Netherlands, and the oldest surviving university in the country. William, Prince of Orange founded it in 1575 as a Protestant institution during the Dutch Revolt, partly to give the northern Netherlands a place to educate its citizens in religion and to supply the government with trained administrators. The choice of Leiden is said to have rewarded the city for its defence against Spanish attack in 1574. Within fifty years it drew scholars such as Justus Lipsius, Joseph Scaliger and Hugo Grotius, and by the 1640s it was the largest Protestant university in Europe. Baruch Spinoza studied there, and its laboratories later produced the Zeeman effect and the liquefaction of helium. Today it has seven faculties, a second campus in The Hague and a library of more than five million books.