Duke Rudolf IV of Austria founded the University of Vienna in 1365 on the model of the University of Paris, making it the oldest university in the German-speaking world and, at its founding, one of only a handful of universities anywhere north of the Alps. Its original four faculties, theology, law, medicine and the liberal arts, followed the standard medieval pattern, and theology remained the senior faculty for most of the institution's first four centuries, training clergy for the Habsburg lands and producing a long line of scholastic and later Counter-Reformation theologians who shaped Catholic teaching across Central Europe.
The university's relationship to religious authority shifted repeatedly with the politics of the Habsburg monarchy: the Theresian and Josephine reforms of the eighteenth century brought theological education under closer state supervision, and the nineteenth century's broader secularization of Austrian higher education gradually separated confessional formation from academic study of religion as a subject in its own right. That distinction, between training believers and studying belief, is what eventually produced a religious studies department distinct from the Faculty of Catholic Theology under which it had first been housed, a separation that took most of the twentieth century to complete and that mirrors a wider European pattern of religious studies emerging out of, and then apart from, theology faculties.