The University of Paris grew out of the cathedral school of Notre-Dame and the independent masters who taught on the hill across the river. Peter Abelard drew students there in the twelfth century by argument and reputation, and his method of setting authorities against one another and resolving the contradiction became the ordinary shape of theological work. Peter Lombard's Sentences, arranged as a set of questions with the authorities marshalled on each side, became the textbook every candidate in theology had to lecture on, so for four hundred years anyone teaching theology in Latin Europe began by commenting on a book written in Paris.
The masters organised themselves as a corporation, secured papal privileges that put them outside the chancellor's control, and won the right to strike, which they used. The arrival of the friars brought Albert the Great and, after him, Thomas Aquinas to the Dominican chair, and made the university the place where Aristotle, newly available in Latin through translations from Arabic and Greek, was absorbed into Christian theology or resisted.
Resistance was real. The bishop of Paris condemned lists of propositions taught in the arts faculty in 1270 and again, at far greater length, in 1277, some of which touched positions Aquinas held. The faculty of theology afterwards acted as an arbiter of orthodoxy for much of Latin Christendom, consulted by popes and kings, a role it kept into the sixteenth century.