  There was never in Byzantium anything resembling the autonomous universities of the Latin West. Higher education was designed to train officials of the state and church, not masters of the arts and sciences. The Greek-speaking world was small and decreasing, and there was scarcely any demand in it for very specialized scholarship. Moreover, theology never developed into the kind of systematic discipline it became in the Latin West, and logic was never acknowledged as an ancillary discipline (although it was taught at the Patriarchal School, at least in the Palaiologan period). All this contributed to the prevalence in Byzantine higher education of an encyclopedic ideal, and to the preference of rhetorical over philosophical studies.