Most aspects of the history of Leiden University already attracted the attention of scholars: the teachers, the students, and the education. This book focuses on a less well-studied aspect of the first university of the Northern Netherlands, namely: its governmental and economic history from the foundation until 1812, the year it became part of the French Université Impériale. The main question to be answered is to which degree shape and functioning of the governing board added to its blossom in the seventeenth, as well as its decline in the eighteenth century.