The University of Aberdeen is a public research university in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland. It is an ancient university founded in 1495 when William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, petitioned Pope Alexander VI on behalf of James IV, King of Scots to create King's College. This makes it Scotland's third-oldest university (after the University of St. Andrews and the University of Glasgow) and fifth-oldest in the English-speaking world. The university as it is today was formed in 1860 by a merger between King's College (which had always referred to itself as the University of Aberdeen) and Marischal College, a second university founded in 1593 in Aberdeen city centre as a Protestant alternative to King's College. Today, the University of Aberdeen is consistently ranked among the top 150 universities in the world and is one of two universities in Aberdeen, the other being The Robert Gordon University.