Some of the world’s greatest universities have been open for business since before gunpowder reached Europe. While plenty of ancient seats of learning have shut down, split apart, or been rebuilt beyond recognition over the centuries, a select group has managed to keep teaching students almost continuously for the better part of a millennium.

Here are 10 of the oldest universities according to the QS Universities ranking in the world still running today — mostly clustered in Europe, with one standout from Africa.

Bologna carries the nickname “Nourishing Mother of the Studies”, and it’s widely considered the oldest university in the Western world that has never stopped operating since it opened its doors. For much of its early history it focused purely on doctorate-level study, though today it offers programmes across every level. More than 85,000 students are enrolled there now, and its alumni roll includes three popes.

Nobody can pin down Oxford’s exact birth year, but records of teaching there stretch back to at least 1096, making it the oldest English-speaking university on the planet. Its graduates include 28 British prime ministers, 20 archbishops of Canterbury, a dozen saints and Stephen Hawking. Oxford now serves more than 24,000 students and runs the largest university press anywhere in the world.

Salamanca began teaching in 1134 and picked up its royal charter in 1218, making it Spain’s oldest surviving university once the now-defunct University of Palencia is set aside. Christopher Columbus reportedly pleaded his case for royal backing of his Indies expedition here in the late 1400s. Around 26,700 students now study across its nine campuses west of Madrid.

Better known as “la Sorbonne”, Paris was one of the earliest universities anywhere in Europe, but its story hasn’t been unbroken. The French Revolution shut it down in 1793, and it didn’t reopen until 1896. Today the original institution has splintered into several separate universities, some of which have since merged or reorganised again.

Cambridge exists because a group of Oxford scholars packed up and left following a political falling-out in 1209. The two schools have shared a friendly rivalry ever since, most visibly in their annual Boat Race. Cambridge has gone on to build a reputation to match Oxford’s, producing its own long list of Nobel laureates and world leaders.

Padua was born out of a breakaway group from Bologna and quickly built a name for pioneering research in astronomy, law, medicine and philosophy. Galileo once taught there. Roughly 62,500 students now study in the city that Shakespeare used as the setting for The Taming of the Shrew, and the university’s botanical garden, planted in 1545, is one of the oldest of its kind still standing.

This one has a royal origin story: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II set it up himself, making it one of the first state-run universities anywhere, with no church involvement in its founding. It now teaches around 80,000 students in Naples, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, and counts philosopher Thomas Aquinas among its historic alumni.

Tucked into the Tuscan hill city of Siena, this university enrols upwards of 20,000 students — nearly half the population of the city itself. Siena’s mediaeval old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in its own right, pulling in over 163,000 visitors a year for its art, food and centuries-old streets.

Coimbra started life in Lisbon before Portuguese kings shuffled it back and forth between cities several times, eventually settling it permanently in Coimbra. For long stretches of the 18th century, it was the only university operating anywhere in Portugal. UNESCO added it to its World Heritage List in 2013, citing its historic buildings and courtyards. It now teaches just over 24,000 students.

The oldest institution on this list by a wide margin, Al-Azhar started life in Cairo in 970 AD as a madrasa teaching students from the primary level right up through advanced Islamic scholarship. Scholars still debate whether it counts as a “university” in the mediaeval European sense before its modern reorganisation, but its age alone earns it a spot here.

It survived a brutal setback in the 12th century when a change in ruling dynasty led to the destruction of more than 100,000 texts, yet it endured and has since added secular subjects like business, medicine, engineering and agriculture to its curriculum — giving Africa a genuine claim to some of the deepest academic roots on the planet.