It was, however, to the mercantile quarter near to the island city that the right bank principally owed its development ; it thus acquired the character of the central business quarter which it has retained to the present day. This was strictly speaking the Town, as opposed to the left bank, which came to be called the University, the latter having been founded there early in the 13th century and having at once taken possession of it. Thus there is an organic division, corresponding to the natural division of the site of Paris, which accounts for the old expression "the Town, City and University of Paris." About 1175 there existed at the foot of the Chatelet of the Petit-Pont a township which was a fief of the abbey of Saint Germain-des-Pres. Another township clustered round the abbey itself. The district to the west of the Petit-Pont came under the feudal overlordship of the same abbey, while the district to the east was subject to the abbey of Sainte-Genevieve, which also had a township gathering round it ; on the bank of the Bievre was the village of Saint-Medard, and still farther to the south the township centring round the collegiate church of Saint-Marcel. The abbey of Saint-Victor, founded during the reign of Louis VI., formed yet another nucleus of rural population in the neighbour hood of what is now the Halle aux Vins. The church of Notre Dames-des-Champs, situated in the cultivated land on the plateau by the road which continued the rue Saint-Jacques, also formed the centre of a small cluster of rustic houses. This bank of the river was mainly devoted to the cultivation of the vine.
Later, however, the various groups of buildings were enclosed within a rampart ; it was built by Philip Augustus, and dates from 1190 on the right bank and about 1209 on the left bank. To de scribe its course in terms of present-day Paris, the wall on the right bank started from the end of the Pont-des-Arts in front of the Louvre, reached the rue Saint-Honore opposite the Oratoire, and thence ran parallel to the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau as far as the rue Montmartre, whence, following the direction of the rue Etienne-Marcel, it reached the rue Saint-Martin. Thence it bent in the direction of the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and thus, passing by the southern end of the rue de Sevigne, reached the rue Saint-Antoine and the Seine. The gates were situated at the position of the present-day rue Saint-Antoine, rue Vieille-du Temple, rue Saint-Martin, rue Saint-Denis, rue Saint-Honore and quai du Louvre. Outside the rampart, in the south-western part of what is now the courtyard of the Louvre, was a tower of de fence which Philip Augustus called "our tower of the Louvre." This is the origin of the palace of that name. The wall on the left bank ran in the direction of the rue des Fosses-Saint-Bernard, touched the place du Pantheon on the south, cut through the rue Soufflot and ran parallel to the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, rue de 1'Ancienne Comedie and rue Mazarine, to the east of those streets.
New churches were erected about this time at the points where the town was growing. On the right bank of the river, Saint Honore was built early in the 13th century in the street of the same name, opposite where the Magasins du Louvre now stand ; Saint-Eustache was built in 1223 at the point where the rue Montmartre met the rue Montorgueil, by which sea fish arrived in Paris. On the left bank there were Saint-Sulpice, first men
tioned in 1211, and Saint-Andre-des-Arts, built about 1215. Saint Etienne-du-Mont was built in 1222 to serve the growing parish around the abbey of Sainte-Genevieve. Finally, Saint-Nicolas-du Chardonnet (1243) was erected farther east as the parish church for a population which, here as elsewhere, had increased as a re sult of the building of Philip Augustus' fortifications. The left bank was more particularly the domain of the Church, on which the University was dependent. It was here that the four mendicant orders established themselves—the Preaching Friars or Jacobins in 1219 near the corner of the rue Saint-Jacques and the modern rue Soufflot ; the Cordeliers in 123o in what is now the rue de l'Ecole-de-Medecine; the Austin Friars in 1293 on the quai des Augustins, named after them; the Carmelites in 1319 in the place Maubert. The Carthusians settled in 1259 on the site of the modern avenue de l'Observatoire. A large number of colleges were established on the left bank of the river in the second half of the 13th century and the 14th century, among them the college founded in 1257 by Robert de Sorbon and named after him the Sorbonne.
The opposite bank was the centre of activity of the trades. Towards the middle of the 13th century there grew up the first municipal authority : the Prevote des marchands. Its headquar ters, the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois, was near the Chatelet. The latter was the seat of the administration of the provost of Paris, who represented the royal authority. The centre of commercial ac tivity on the Seine later shifted to the Greve, and in consequence the Parloir-aux-Bourgeois was transferred there in 1357, to the site which has ever since been occupied by the Hotel de Ville. The kings of France also contributed to the making of the right bank, adding the royal to the commercial element. Charles V. (1364-80) built the Hotel Saint-Paul, which was his favourite residence, south of the rue Saint-Antoine. No trace of it remains. From that time onwards the kings no longer made the palace in the city (now the Palais de Justice) which had been rebuilt by Philip the Fair, their habitual residence. Charles VI. lived in the Hotel Saint-Paul, and his successors in the Hotel des Tournelles, near the modern place des Vosges. After the death of Henry II. (1559) the kings took up their residence in the Louvre, thus transferring their favour from the east of Paris to the west—a fact to which the development of the west of Paris is entirely due. The fortunes of Paris were as a matter of fact closely bound up with those of the French monarchy. It was the fact that Paris was the royal. capital which, from the 12th century onwards, conferred on it a peculiar lustre. Manners became more refined, and the city came to be an intellectual and artistic centre in which crafts of all kinds flourished.