The Great Exchange JOAD RAYMOND WREN
Making the News in Early Modern Europe
The Great Exchange
Joad Raymond Wren
The Great Exchange
Making the News in Early Modern Europe
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to Georgina, we were only waiting for this moment to arise . . .
List of Illustrations
p. 44 Avviso from the Fuggerzeitungen, 1585, National Library of Austria, Fuggerzeitungen codex 8958, seite 234.
p. 74 Venice’s Broglio in Paesi nouamente ritrouati per la nauigatione di Spagna (Milan, 1517), Library of Congress, E101 .F84 1517.
p. 113 Engraving of a courier bringing news of peace and joy, Neuer Aus Münster vom 25 des Weinmonats im Jahr 1648, Flugblatt (1648).
pp. 144–5 Commemorative engraving of the Battle of Lepanto (1571), Library of Congress, G1015.L25 1575.
p. 149 Siege map from Johann Peter von Vaelckeren, Vienna à Turcis Obsessa (Vienna, 1683), Vienna City Hall Library.
p. 152 Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Compra chi vuole (Bologna, 1684), Rijksmuseum, S. Emmering Bequest.
p. 153 Annibale Carracci, Diverse figure (Rome, 1646), Rijksmuseum, S. Emmering Bequest.
p. 157 Antwerp’s Bourse (Antwerp, 1531), University of Antwerp, tg:uapr:665.
p. 179 The trewe encountre or batayle lately don betwene Englande and Scotlande (London, 1513). University of California.
p. 181 Printed broadside of the Prince of Wales’ entry into Madrid. Jan Schorkens, Intocht van de prins van Wales, de toekomstige Karel I, koning van Engeland, te Madrid (Madrid, 1623–5). Rijksmuseum.
p. 183 Woodcuts of the 1607 Bristol Channel floods from pamphlets printed in London (1607, Yale University),
list of illustrations
Amsterdam (1608, De nationale bibliotheek van Nederland), London (1607) and, reporting a 1613 flood in Weimar, Schmalkalden (1613, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel).
p. 184 Strange News of a prodigious Monster (London, 1613). Folger Shakespeare Library.
p. 187 London’s Bills of Mortality, 22–29 August 1665, Wellcome Collection.
p. 195 Earliest extant copy of the Avisa Relation oder Zeitung (Wolfenbüttel, 1609), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library.
p. 204 Osborne 1622. A new almanacke and prognostication for the yeare of our Lord God 1622, being the second after leape yeare (London, 1622). Folger Shakespeare Library.
p. 205 An almanach for the yere M.D.LXII. made by maister Michael Nostradamus Doctour in Phisicke, of Salon of Craux in Provance (London, 1562). Folger Shakespeare Library.
p. 215 Drawing of quill and flask by Francesco di Marco Datini. Archivio di Stato di Prato, Datini, 232, guardia anteriore. Permission of Ministero della cultura. Further reproduction by any means is prohibited.
p. 216 Engraving of the Siege of Antwerp, 1585. Warhafftiger vnd eygentlicher bericht und Abconterfactur der gewaltigen vor nie erhörten Festung vnd Schiffbruck (Augsburg, 1585), Zentralbibliothek Zürich, PAS II 22/5.
p. 217 Mercurius Civicus no. 61, 17–25 July 1644. State Library Victoria.
p. 244 Printed broadside of Capt. Whitney’s Confession (London, 1693). Pepys Ballads 2.186, by permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
p. 276 Broadsheet news map, Overwinningen van Piet Hein op de Portugese oorlogs- en koopvaardijvloot in de baai bij San Salvador, 3 maart en 11 juni 1627 (Amsterdam, 1627). Rijksmuseum.
p. 312 Merkuriusz Polski no. 1, 3 January 1661. Biblioteki Publiczne M.St. Warszawy.
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p. 329 A Very Profitable Boke . . . Libro muy provechoso, a dialogue on commerce (London, 1554).
p. 331 Florios Second Frutes (London, 1591). Fondation Martin Bodmer, Université de Genéve.
p. 336 Jan Dirksz Both, ‘Gehoor’ (1620–38). Rijksmuseum.
p. 338 Adriaen Matham, ‘Twee bedelaars’ (?1620–40). Engraving with etching by J. Matham after Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne. Rijksmuseum.
p. 340 Broadside by Wenceslaus Hollar and Henry Peacham, The World is Ruled & Governed by Opinion, c. 1642. Folger Shakespeare Library.
p. 386 Hermann Weinsberg’s Gedenkbücher, 1576. Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln.
p. 393 Newsletter dated 15 August 1678 received by the Newdigate family in Warwickshire. Folger Shakespeare Library.
p. 416 Broadsheet advertising The Office of Publick Advice (London, 1657). Permission of the National Library of Scotland, Crawford.RP.817, loan of the Balcarres Heritage Trust.
p. 421 Frankfurter Frag- und Anzeigungs-Nachrichten (Frankfurt Enquiry Office and Advertisement News) no. 78, 17 Sept. 1772. Goethe Universität Frankfurt.
p. 443 Jan van Hilten’s Courante uyt Italien en Duytschlandt, &c. (Amsterdam, 1623). National Library of Sweden.
p. 445 Abraham Verhoeven’s Nieuw Tijdinghe no. 54 (Antwerp, April 1621). Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience.
p. 452 Two early issues of the Gazette (1631 and 1632) alongside a supplementary Extraordinaire (no. 115, 30 September 1649) and another supplement, La Declaration Des Estats D’Ecosse (no. 83, 1649). Newberry Library.
p. 458 Noticias do Estado (Lisbon, 1689). Newberry Library.
p. 469 ‘Diurnall Occurrences’, 22–29 November 1641. Permission of the National Library of Scotland, MS.2688 (i), folio 353 recto.
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p. 470 Heads of Severall Proceedings (London, 29 November 1641). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. p. 473 The Oxford Gazette, no. 1 (Oxford, 14 November 1665). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. p. 479 Tlysau yr Hen Oesoedd (Holyhead, 1735).
Plates
1. Archivio di Stato di Prato, Datini, 175, coperta; Datini 1157/1, c. 1r. Permission of Ministero della cultura. Further reproduction by any means is prohibited.
2. Nicolas Sanson, Carte géographicque des postes qui trauersent la France (Paris, 1632). Historic Maps Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
3. Caspar Augustinus, chart of postal routes from Augsburg (Augsburg, 1629).
4. Ein wunderbarlicher Fisch fürwar/ Inn Dennmarck gefangen dises iar/ M.D.XLVI (Strassburg?, 1546).
5. Cornelis Brisé, Documenten betreffende de Thesaurie der Stad Amsterdam, 1656. Amsterdam Museum, inv.nr. SA 3024.
6. Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten, Tromp l’oeil, 1664. Dordrechts Museum.
7. Edward Collier, letter rack genre painting, 1698. Art Gallery of South Australia.
8. Edward Collier, Trompe l’oeil. Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.
9. Painting of pontoon bridge, 1585. National Library of Austria, Fuggerzeitungen codex 8958, seite 234.
10. Kawaraban, 1855. Tokyo Metropolitan Library, Tokyo Shiryo Collection 0277-C56.
11. The Electric and International Telegraph Company’s Map of the Telegraph Lines of Europe, 1856 (London, 1856). Historic Maps Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Note on Conventions
Dates
The Julian calendar, which had been introduced in the Roman Republic in 46–45 bce (or 708–709 auc , according to the Roman calendar), had by the sixteenth century drifted off the seasons and solstices by several days, because the solar year is eleven minutes and fifteen seconds short of the reckoned 365¼ days. The solstices occurred increasingly early, and the church in particular was troubled by this calendrical drift, as Easter (which was, to complicate matters further, calculated according to the lunar calendar) slipped towards summer and Christmas slipped towards spring. Astronomers accordingly looked for more accurate calculations of the solar year and a more useful calendar. A solution was found by Christopher Clavius, a German astronomer and mathematician, who calculated that the year was 36597⁄400 days; he deduced that the calendar could be synchronized by eliminating leap year days in three years every four centuries (which could be done by recognizing 29 February only every fourth time the year ended ‘00’). This calendar was introduced by a papal bull issued by Pope Gregory in 1582; hence it is known as the Gregorian calendar (popes trumping astronomers), though contemporaries tended to refer to the date as stilo novo, new style, as opposed to stilo veteris, or old style.1 The bull was issued in February, with effect from October 1582, and at the point of change there was ten days difference between the two calendars, hence Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed by Friday 15 October 1582 according to the new style. However, this practice was only immediately implemented in the Italian city states, France and the Iberian Peninsula. In 1583–4 it was
adopted in most of the Netherlands and the Catholic areas of the Holy Roman Empire, and then only later across the Protestant countries of the Holy Roman Empire and Scandinavia. It was not introduced in Britain until 1752, at which point the discrepancy was eleven days (it had reached eleven on 28 February 1700), hence the cry of those protesting against the reform: ‘Give us back our eleven days.’ The last European country to adopt the new style was Greece in 1923.2
Potentially sowing further confusion, in some countries the year began at Easter; in England it began on Lady Day, 25 March (and in Scotland, Florence, Naples and Pisa too, though in Pisa the year was calculated from 25 March before Christ’s birth, so it was one year ahead); others recognized it as 1 January. (The tax year begins on 6 April in Britain because of this reform: 25 March became 5 April in 1752; a further day was omitted for correction in 1800, hence 6 April.) In Venice the year began on 1 January (and Venetians used more Veneto, or m.v., to avoid confusion). Hence 3 February 1600 in Venice was 24 January 1599 in London. This applied only to Christian Europe; the Ottoman Empire used the Hijri calendar; Jews used the Hebrew calendar, depending on context.
Throughout this book I generally use the local calendar, though indicating both old and new dates where there is potential confusion. Where the year is taken to begin on Lady Day, 25 March, rather than 1 January, I also indicate the year parenthetically thus: 14/24 February 1623[4].
Languages
All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. As news is grammatically both singular and plural in English, I use it interchangeably so here.
Distances
I’ve tried to offer an overview of, and to quantify, the various speeds at which news moved around Europe between the fifteenth and
eighteenth centuries. To enable comparisons – between different routes, between different areas, and between different news events and their reportings – I’ve measured distance point-to-point. I have not sought to recover and measure the actual routes that horses and ships could have traversed in carrying news, often quite different from modern routes. Hence distances are measured linearly, and speeds are calculated according to these measurements. They ignore mountains and rivers. The figures, therefore, understate the speed that the news actually travelled in real time, along roads and over seas; rather they are the product of how long news took to pass from origin to destination.
Spelling
My transcriptions preserve original spellings, though I have silently modernized i/j and u/v. Both are more or less substitutable in early modern orthography and typography, and to change them does not alter meaning. I have silently expanded contractions where they are clearly indicated. For transcriptions of medieval texts I have modernized thorn, so þ = th. In early modern orthography ‘then’ is commonly used for the modern comparative ‘than’.
After the fall of Constantinople
Danzig/Gdansk
Stockholm
Helsinki
Riga St Petersburg
Warsaw
Prague
Breslau Bratislava/Pressburg
Vienna
Graz
Bohemia HUNGARY
Budapest
Belgrade
Zadar
Ragusa
Corfu
Lepanto Königsberg
Vilna
Ioannina
Danube
Lviv Messina Negroponte
Chios
Adrianople
Constantinople Aleppo Kraków
Smyrna
Preface
This is a history of news, and it contends that just as news isn’t confined to newspapers, radio, television or the internet, so its history cannot be reduced to a particular medium. Accordingly this is a history of collective and combined acts of communication, the stories people shared, how they did so, the way this bound them together, the world they made. It is a fundamentally human story, but one that unfolds on an impersonal scale. It begins a little before 1400, when the channels through which news would come to flow all around Europe first become visible, and it ends shortly after 1800, when these channels were finally supplanted by a concatenation of technologies, institutions and industries that defined the news landscape through to the twentieth century, and partly define it still. Though these centuries saw the innovation of many of the conventions of news we recognize today, news then moved in ways that are much less familiar. Stories of things happening were collected and carried by something unprecedented: a vast, invisible system not conceived or constructed by any individual or entity. It was not controlled by any royal, state or commercial power, nor was it limited to any jurisdiction or territory. This system – a network – embodied a new quantity and a new quality of connectivity. It brought people distributed around the continent into contact, touching and shaping richly idiosyncratic lives across geographical and political boundaries. Their appetite for news was nothing new. But they now had the means to satiate this hunger – even to feel that there was a surfeit.
This transformation in communication was both subtle and reaching, and in it we can see the emergence of news as we understand it. An envoy deployed to Florence could not just hope but positively
expect to learn about the Spanish fleet’s arrival at Lisbon. A mercer in Paris could anticipate regular updates on developments in the United Duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg. A merchant in London could compare differing accounts of court intrigues from as far away as Istanbul. Knowledge that news would come brought with it a new sense of timeliness and a new sense of community, mapped by the locations from which news regularly arrived. They belonged to a place, they understood, through their connectedness to other people. Their sense of where they stood in the world shifted.
Until recently, most histories of news media took the newspaper to be its paradigm and the nation its unit. This helped historians manage the overwhelming quantities of archival material and other evidence, but it obscured how communication actually happened: first, assuming that the past was largely an anticipation of the present, making the history of media little more than a chronology of the innovations that brought us to where we stand now; and secondly, obscuring the ways news spread when the nation state lacked the sharp definition it would later possess. To write the history of newspapers in a particular country seems like writing the history of the surface of a tusk, unaware that there is an elephant in the room. My intention here is to write not a series of parallel or comparative national histories but a continuous account of the dynamic and uninterrupted communications network that flourished between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, centred on Europe, or a part of that continent, which was the object the network sought to describe. I take neither the idea of Europe nor the idea of a network lightly. Any residual emphasis on English sources follows from earlier projects – in the rhetoric of politics, the civil wars of Britain, pamphleteering, the power of the periodical press to influence a public, and other adventures – but this book seeks to be thoroughly and unreservedly European in scope and outlook, while suggesting ways of thinking about what Europeanness might mean.
The premise of this enterprise – its attention to the traction of particular sentences as well as the architecture of the European news network in silos of sentences that are too numerous to read – stands on the diligence of late medieval and early modern newsmongers in preserving through repeated iterations the place and time of the communication of a news story, embedded in the news itself. For them this
recorded the provenance and therefore reliability of the news; to us it appears as metadata. Libraries have often struggled with their news holdings, largely because of their perceived ephemerality and resistance to classification methods intended for books. In recent decades, however, heritage projects have made much of them, cataloguing and digitizing hundreds of thousands of letters, pamphlets and papers, from informal written notes to large printed sheets. The availability of these news artefacts for harvesting, with the development of quantitative methods – particularly those of network analysis – makes it possible to examine the life of news on a continental scale. How much of it there was, where it came from, where it went and how long it took can now be traced. It was in the patterns of this motion that the network first became visible, its very existence verifiable.
The future will bring more data. Bibliographers and archivists will continue their labours, reluctant public-funded institutions will share more of their holdings in raw form, data will be more easily scraped, AI will be deployed to resolve more comprehensively some of the quantitative questions addressed here. But I am only flesh and bone and numbers aren’t everything. Here they are combined with more traditional, humanist modes of analysis, rooted in a belief in communities and the importance of listening, in order to do something new. At its heart remains an attempt to describe actual experiences of news: of wanting it, finding, interpreting and using it, and how these experiences combined to form a much larger, tenuous thing, a news network and a sense of European identity, the complex reality of something personal and material that is simultaneously at the outer reaches of humanity. I describe these at the same time precisely because they happened at the same time.
We take ourselves with us wherever we go, and with something as inescapable as news that means having as company our habits and expectations, our impassioned responses and views of the roles and mechanics of the media familiar to us. Our anxieties about truth are easily read into the strategies devised by medieval merchants to relay information and trust at a distance, our stance on the news disruptors of the twenty-first century into the reports of wars and shifting allegiances of the eighteenth. But though the writers and translators, printers and publishers, couriers and consumers of news we will
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meet all inhabited a tissue of connections that criss-crossed Europe, the nature of this network meant much of its shape and significance lay beyond their understanding or speculation. Whether or not they detected it, their personal interactions with news were facilitated and framed by a colossal international system – itself marvellously woven from the countless little objects that passed through it and the conversations they inspired. This study is, I believe, the first explicitly to treat these as parts of the same whole. For it is only by taking the sensuous, human experience of communication together with its wider landscape that we can hear the first sounding of news, and grasp how it was then understood and imagined.
This is The Great Exchange. My title is appropriated from a description of Paul’s Walk in London in 1628, a place where people gathered to talk news in many languages, making a great buzz, ‘the whole worlds Map . . . the great Exchange of all discourse’.1 John Earle’s phrase is satirical (in satire a resonant phrase triumphs), but nonetheless captures the essence and excitement of news. Further it suggests the relationships between connectivity and community, individuals and expansive networks, that run through the following pages. The early modern Europeans we will meet – those who spoke English – would not have used the word network this way; they would have understood it to mean a fine fashioning of interlaced threads, like a spider’s web. But they would have reached for exchange to describe a communication, an act of reciprocal giving, a commercial transaction, and a place where international business and conversation were conducted. In the meeting of those meanings the convergence of commerce and communication that defined their age was made manifest, and there they experienced most hauntingly the rising tides of news.
Introduction A Trembling Movement
In the middle of the eighteenth century most educated Europeans read newspapers, but nonetheless looked down on and wrote disparagingly of them, or of their effects on the less educated.1 The Lombard economist and historian Pietro Vèrri (1728–97) provides an exception, and it is with his humane and perspicacious insights, written in 1764–5, that we will begin:
Another kind of periodical paper . . . are those containing news of every kind; for the most part these contain nothing but news or politics or literature; but it would be desirable that they extended to all sorts of affairs, political, moral, scientific and artistic; thus could the curious of posterity see our century as a whole; and in detail; and the same could we, which should most interest us; from the abundance of things to draw out all kinds of moral, political or scientific views, satisfying at the same time the kind of people to whom novelty serves as food and life. These news make us almost fellow citizens of all Europe; they produce continuous commerce between the different nations, and destroy that distrust and that disdain with which isolated nations regard foreigners. Everything in Europe tends to come closer and to unite, and there is a stronger desire for equality than there was in the past; all of this is due to the community of ideas and enlightenment, and the motion which is discerned in it, and which so much disturbs those whose perspectives have been circumscribed for a century, seems to me similar to that trembling movement which you discern in a liquid before it settles in equilibrium.2
News makes a community; news is the instrument of enlightenment; it satisfies those with real interests as well as those with mere appetites;
news brings unity and promotes equality. At a time when the various words for journalist or gazzettiere in European languages were on the pejorative side of ambivalent, Vèrri paints a pan-continental landscape of understanding, shared human values, amity and concord. Reading news is good for you, good for society, good for promoting intercultural understanding and discouraging conflict throughout Europe. For a century – Vèrri probably means since the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War of 1618–48 – a trembling of the waters has been visible, shifting settled values, enriching, equalizing.
News Moves
News moves. News is shared. News binds people together. News explores mutual cultural values. News provides foundations for personal identity. Through news we find disagreement and conflict. News is undeniably out there, but it is also something between us, and something that we take into us and feel.
News is a physical, material thing. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, an announcement in a particular form, one that we routinely read and are familiar with. News is a matter of habit. We access it at particular times, in particular places, and in particular forms. These forms can be phones, tablets or computers, radio or television, pamphlets, the printed newspaper, or a conversation, often with someone who has heard news by one of these media and chooses to relay it. News media are produced by human activity, sometimes commercial, and are routinely moved by human activities, cart, horse or telegraph. News is always in motion.
Let us observe some varieties of that motion, to understand what news was in the period between about 1400 and 1800, and follow its path from a producer, through medium and context, to the consumer of news. During these centuries, which form the main focus of The Great Exchange, a culture of news-sharing developed and thrived across Europe which was strikingly continuous and brought the continent together.
We begin here with the destination, the consumer: the mid-eighteenthcentury Amsterdam burgher Jan de Boer devoured news, ingested via
print, writing and the spoken word. He worked as a clerk in a vintner’s office, was a multi-instrumentalist (violin, flute and organ), and kept a diary recording much news. News diaries, in which aspects of the diarist’s life are freely mixed with news stories and local chronicle, can be found in fifteenth-century Italy, and in seventeenth-century Britain; in the Netherlands there was a growth in the number of these ‘egodocuments’ in the eighteenth century.
De Boer started his chronicle or diary – contemporaries used these terms interchangeably3 – in 1747, in response to political turmoil. The Dutch Republic had recently entered the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), and had been invaded by the French and shaken by a popular-led political revolution. The manuscript grew into a five-volume Chronologische historie incorporating news obtained by diverse means. First, eyewitnessing things on the streets of Amsterdam: De Boer went out to see for himself and to record in his diary. Secondly, things he had heard, provided they were credible (geloofwaardig ). This news could be gathered on the street from ‘respectable’ burghers and ‘good citizens’ and the ‘frenzied masses’ and ‘riff-raff’, a distinction reflecting the speaker’s political position rather than their social status (which was unusual). Not only on the streets, however, but also in more structured, semi-public places, the beurs or exchange and in bookshops. Social spaces where private individuals could gather informally, often with those involved in a trade, and exchange news were fundamental to how news moved between different forms, including print, writing and the spoken word (chapter 9). Thirdly, printed works that De Boer read, and sometimes copied into his chronicle, and sometimes bought and pasted in. These included newspapers, and excerpts from newspapers. Fourth and finally, handwritten texts, letters to and from merchants, though there were other kinds of written news, including commercial manuscript newsletters, that were available at this time (chapter 2).
De Boer was exceptional in many respects: he preserved his news stories, and did so in a structured form and at great length. He was more systematic in his gathering of news than most. He reflected and wrote explicitly on the nature of credibility, even though his criteria were partisan. He aligns with a broader shift in reading habits in eighteenth-century Europe, from intensive reading to extensive
reading: from reading a few texts, carefully and repeatedly, to more impressionistic reading of many texts, focused on comparing and conferring. He was, however, unusual in being among the minority of Europeans who could read at all, though being Dutch helped (pp. 56–9, below).
Consumers of news received it in spoken, written and printed forms, and they actively digested it, copied it, repurposed it, managed it. They weighed whether or not it was true. These are three of the central themes that will reappear throughout The Great Exchange : copying, trust, managing. We will find them in various modes, because not only consumers but also producers engaged in the same activities. Who were these producers? Where and how did the materials that De Boer and his contemporaries read originate? News were written by merchants and ambassadors, postmasters, military men, scholars and scribes. The profession of journalist did not yet exist: writers may have been remunerated, but did not belong to a single, identifiable profession. There were also editors, men and women who selected news, whose role is discussed in a moment. There were the writers of avvisi known variously in Italy as menanti, reportisti, novellari, who harvested information and composed weekly newsletters: this news they might gather by word of mouth in marketplaces, piazze, taverns, barbers’ shops and ports, but also from correspondence and other newsletters. The news were collaboratively written, texts were not owned or copyrighted. Instead they were copied, edited, rewritten, recopied, and sold or passed on.
A circuit of communication comprises not only the producer and consumer. During the act of communication, the addresser speaks a message to the addressee using a particular medium, in a specific language and within a broader context. So, in addition to the news-consumer and the news-speaker, there are, first, the medium of contact; secondly, the messages or content; thirdly, what sociolinguists would call the ‘code’, the language or discourse of communication; and fourthly and finally, the context. The Great Exchange examines all these in detail, but here in brief: the medium is at the heart of my argument. This is not a book about newspapers. Expanding our horizons, in terms of media and chronology, shows how limited the effects of newspapers were. They were only one part of a broader diet of
news, one that developed in the seventeenth century closely following models established in the sixteenth. Forms of printed news followed and complemented manuscript newsletters, and in particular the weekly manuscript newsletter form known as the avviso (chapters 2, 5). The newspaper was initially merely a printed avviso, making available more numerous and cheaper copies of an existing periodical news form; and there were many genres of printed news that were similar to and overlapped with newspapers, and others that were occasional and intermittent, but similarly informed a reading public (chapters 7, 15). And both written and printed news complemented (and shaped) the spoken word. Weekly newsletters, newspapers and other printed news all relied on copying and repetition. They were designed to fit into a society in which news was spoken. All three worked together and shaped each other (chapters 8, 9), as can be seen, in one idiosyncratic microcosm, in De Boer’s collecting practices. This book therefore is a history not of the development of the newspaper but of news itself.
Next, the ‘message’ or content. News media conveyed stories. Stories of war, diplomacy, peace, political turmoil; of natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes, plagues, floods; of life at court, royal entries and processions, coronations and births; of crimes and punishments; of society more broadly, usually in other countries; of commerce and foreign trade; of books and other cultural events. News was stories of things happening, and The Great Exchange tries to capture the stimulus and excitement news brought, by looking at these stories, big and small, through many sources. But these were not presented as stories – digested by an editor into a house style, with a particular voice and perhaps a guide to interpretation – but as snippets in relatively unmodified paragraphs of news, identifying their place and date of origin (which assisted in the generation of trust). These paragraphs were selected and usually minimally edited. This too is another form of copying: multiple copies were made of an edited version of something that had been copied from an original (or ‘copy’ in another sense).
The news was not universally true. There was false news, there was news that was premature and incomplete, and there was some news that was forged, intentionally spread with the purpose of deceiving.
However, early modern Europe did not suffer from a surfeit of what is now termed ‘fake news’. While news may have been presented in a partial way, and while governments may have restricted access, they did not manage it in such a way entirely to deceive. The system of spreading news, the network of communication, provided surprisingly robust means of assessing reliability. Moreover, editors were careful to qualify the reliability of stories, often emphasizing that earliest reports needed to be compared with reports from other locations and sources, and calibrated in relation to future news updates. Readers followed this lead, and understood, as De Boer did, that news needed to be weighed. Despite false news entering the system, and being spread by it, the system itself for the most part seems careful and measured, even sceptical (chapter 13).
Editors were responsible for gathering news and advertising, and sometimes writing editorial matter. They looked for good sources, but they did not seek to be entirely comprehensive. They did not try to record everything that happened, to provide a chronicle of the preceding week. They bundled paragraphs together into a publication. They assumed that their readers would have several suppliers, certainly including conversations but also perhaps other publications, written or printed. This collation of paragraphs and consumption of multiple items are different forms of the multifaceted process I refer to as bundling (chapter 8). Many people were involved in intentionally gathering and communicating news, and shaped the news through their work, but – and this is essential to the way news was communicated in early modern Europe – news was spread by diverse means and by the agency of many, and the system was not comprehended as a whole. While news was certainly managed, it travelled across a complex web beyond the reach or even understanding of one person or one government. In modern terms, it was a network, and networks function in complex, self-organizing ways (chapters 3, 4, 14, 15). Bundling and networks join copying, trust and managing are among the themes that recur throughout the story of news in Europe.
Next ‘code’, by which I mean the language of news; although this was, of course, many languages. The vernaculars of Europe made the news available to a wide readership, and through them to a nonreading audience. While Latin was a lingua franca accessible to a large,
geographically dispersed audience, vernaculars made news available to less socially privileged audiences, though ones concentrated in smaller areas. News media, written and printed, existed in most European tongues. The news in them was often the same: paragraphs were mobile, and moved between languages. The news network depended on translators. They were not ambitious literary workers, but professional, jobbing translators, who rendered a text from one language into another literally and expeditiously (chapter 11). Working with editors and publishers they created a pan-European communications network in which paragraphs of news spread around an expansive area concurrently in different languages and in various written and printed forms (chapters 2, 11, 15). In the time of the wars against the Ottoman Empire, the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and a climate-driven crisis that saw governments fall across the globe in the mid-seventeenth century, the language of news communication tended to be surprisingly moderate, informative, non-inflammatory. However partial the uses of news might be, the terms in which it was shared were seldom overheated.
Finally, context: while this might seem boundless, as few things are not relevant to the story of news and communication, the idea helps us to focus on some influential social developments. To the newspaper – as opposed to news – the printing press was essential. The increasing bureaucratization of European states, and the dependence of those states on paperwork, was a powerful spur to news forms; and, simultaneously, states were concerned to ensure a degree of control over the growing news culture, which challenged the secretive and restrictive culture of governance (chapter 14). International diplomacy also depended on news, and both promoted the movement and international exchange of news, and shaped the very forms in which news was written (chapters 2, 3, 7). As important as diplomacy was the rise of a mercantile culture that relied on written transactions and the exchange of news over long distances. Merchants, ever pragmatic, wrote letters, and devised forms that could facilitate communication over long distances and between cultures (chapters 1, 6). This introduces the sixth and final theme that recurs throughout the history of news: improvisation. All of the agents involved in this business – the newswriters and news readers, the translators, the publishers and the
merchants – all actively improvised. They used the materials at hand – existing news forms, new technologies, emerging opportunities – and made novel things or established novel channels of communication. There were no rule books or manuals for news: it was a creative industry. It was hard to define, to describe, to categorize (chapter 12).
One essential context was the development of postal services that crossed much of Europe (chapter 4). Posts were based on horse relay systems, with fixed staging posts, usually controlled by crown or state but permitting private use in order to defray costs. They were essential to the economic transportation of both news and the material objects – letters and newspapers – that conveyed news. They were also essential to the robustness of a network of communication, because postal systems ensured that dynamic hubs or entrepôts linked smaller, less busy, less connected places. Because of Augsburg, and via Augsburg, Dillingen and Günzburg received their news; because of London, Cambridge received its news. Postal services were international and crossed political boundaries, but also joined up to make a network greater than any single postal service. The frequency of posts, together with the speed of horses and the intervals between staging posts, more or less determined the speed at which news moved. There were changes of expectations about the speed of posts, and there were occasions on which, and limited circumstances within which, news travelled exceptionally fast, but the speed of news did not change radically in the early modern period (chapters 1, 3, 4, 5). It usually travelled medium to long distances (100 kilometres or more) at a speed between 1.5 kph and 5 kph measured as the crow flies (which is to say, ignoring roads, rivers and mountains). Though news does not travel by linear means; and in fact the figure of speech is misleading, as crows do not fly in straight lines but in zigzags. Roads improved, and more routes became more reliable, but speed increases were incremental and uneven.
Producers and consumers, speakers of and listeners to news, in conjunction with the media, the news content, the language of exchange and the broader social context, together form circuits of communication. The Great Exchange traces the development and decline of these circuits, and in using uncounted primary sources and a rich field of big data it shows how these circuits in fact constituted a network. But
a network sounds like an abstract and impersonal thing, and this was much more, something material, something real. This network was an aspect of everyday life, of individual experience, the give and take of human interaction. And it also forged a sense of connectedness, sharedness, a sense of place, a sense of community.
European Neighbours
News is content addressed by a speaker to a listener, using a particular medium, in a specific language and within a broader context: this framework is what gives the content meaning, but it is also a useful way of defining what news is. When it fits this frame, and the speaker and listener agree that it’s news, then it’s news.
As Pietro Vèrri wrote, news communication created a community of citizens, networked, multilingual, commercial, robustly informative, public. These practices of copying and improvising, bundling items, establishing trust, establishing and using networks, and managing both news and the means of transmitting it, fashioned a mode of shared communication that shaped and enriched Europe. This did not extend across all of continental Europe: it was centred on the west, though Muscovy and Istanbul were connected through less public means. The geographical area covered by the most intensive flows of news more or less corresponded with late medieval Latin Christendom. However, this community did not have a sharp boundary: communication extended beyond the posts and beyond the regular flows (chapter 10). North Africa was connected to Europe by diplomats and especially merchants, and news moved between the two. The same cannot be said for Japan and China, which had their own news systems (pp. 288–95, below). But as we shall see, there were areas where news slowed down and became less plentiful, and this made places beyond those areas seem less connected, less near, whatever their actual geographical distance. The community of news in Europe was based on tightly connected centres rather than boundaries.
There is a sense, then, in which the news media developed in this period – the newsletters, avvisi, the printed news and newspapers – and the practices that were used in these media – copying, improvising,
bundling, managing news, conveying trust, and constructing networks – together with the news events – the wars, the religious controversies, the political turmoil, the diplomacy, the commerce, the weather and the wonders, the everyday events that were communicated by those sharing news as a way of understanding their world – combined to create a sense of belonging. And the place of that belonging, that community, was Europe itself. The news made, and held up a mirror to, Europe.
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453
Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, fell to the forces of the Islamic Ottoman Empire in 1453, and by degrees became Istanbul. That same year the Hundred Years War ended, and an uneasy peace settled in north-west Europe. Between 1452 and 1453, Johannes Gutenberg printed his bible in Mainz, a marker for the European invention of printing by moveable type. These were all newsworthy events, which resonate across the continent down to the present. But how did people hear about them? How was news spread at this time?
People heard news by word of mouth, in the field, street, marketplace or church; most could not read. The question ‘What news?’ was a social lubricant and a quotidian necessity. News was also conveyed by letter. Writing and reading letters was a consequence of literacy, and literacy was the outcome of either education or commerce. There was no embarrassment attached to illiteracy among the elite classes until the sixteenth century, when Europe’s states would begin to centralize, necessitating institutions reliant on paper administration. Both the development of civic administration and the increase in literacy depended on the production of paper in larger quantities; and the early years of state centralization, and the early years of printing, would be beset by paper shortages.1 The spread of literacy in the sixteenth century, however, extended far beyond those directly involved in governance and scholarship. Whether in early modern Europe or Song Dynasty China (960–1279), the higher literacy rates are, the less merely functional literacy is.2 And when more people can read, they do unpredictable and interesting things with that ability.
In medieval Europe literacy was low and dispersed in social and geographical pockets, and writing played a much smaller role in spreading news. We will see this picture changing in the next chapter, but here the scene is set by two groups of correspondents in late medieval Europe: first, a handful of merchants working in northern Italy, especially Florence and Venice, in the fourteenth century; and second, a family of English gentry in the mid-fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses.
The Ricciardi Company of Merchants
Merchants needed news. The speed, reliability and credibility of word of mouth alone were insufficient to meet the demands of business. Merchants’ news was not only narrowly financial – lists of goods, prices, exchange rates – but also political and military. In late medieval Europe merchants developed both fairly regular, shared courier systems and also a semi-formal and semi-standardized format for writing letters, and it was from these communications that Europe’s later news community – public, commercial, intensive, regular, networked – directly developed. Their practices are revealed in letters, chronicles, and diaries compiled by news readers.
The Ricciardi company came from Lucca near Pisa, 37 kilometres from the port town of Livorno, and 50 kilometres from Florence. The company went bankrupt in London in 1303, but a small collection of their letters from 1295 to 1303 survives, conveying mainly news from Tuscany. However, the last letter contains an additional, anomalous item, describing international news only indirectly relevant to the other matters in hand: ‘We have learned from the letters from France about the peace accord between the kings of France and England, that [the English ambassadors] the Count of Savoy and Nichola [sic ] returned to England for a consultation with the king.’3 This fragment reveals some conventions of newsletters, perhaps already established, perhaps nascent. The brief, impersonal paragraph removes the identity of the original letter writer, but begins by indicating its source – letters from France – and trajectory. News of the peace travelled from France to
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453
Lucca and on to London by network, gathered from separate reports which needed to be worthy of trust, despite the distance travelled, and whose source therefore had to be recorded.
The Chronicle of the Villanis
Chroniclers would at this time incorporate in their writing fragments of correspondence. News was thereby absorbed into history, and history could reflect the voice of the news medium as well as the matter. This would continue into the seventeenth century and beyond.4 The chronicle kept by the merchant Giovanni Villani (1276–1348), and after his death by his brother Matteo and then Matteo’s son Filippo, records the history of the family’s native Florence from the time of the Tower of Babel to the present, including stories based on freshly arrived news. The Nuova cronica is full of self-interruptions and outof-sequence reports of very recent events. It was not compiled with the security of retrospection, but repeatedly trips on the heels of time.
Villani’s account of the Battle of Courtrai (also known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs) between the French king and the Flemish in 1302 is, unlike his description of events in Florence the same year, based on written news.5 He updates the battle in something like real time (‘I heard the other day that . . .’), and his concluding segue proposes that it fits into his chronicle because it is ‘newsworthy’ (not a necessary characteristic for a chronicle), and based on reliable sources: ‘I have dedicated so much space to the developments in Flanders because they were newsworthy and surprising, and we had the opportunity to learn the truth about them with an unshaken certainty. But let’s leave these events now and return our attention to the news events from Italy and from our city of Florence . . .’6 Villani’s chronicle has numerous scenes in which news is received: the arrival of news can itself be a significant event, as well as a useful device in telling a story. The year-by-year and paragraph-by-paragraph account of history reads at times like a series of news bulletins:
In the said year [1317], in the month of December, the said M. Cane with his forces led his host against the Paduans, and took Monselici
and Esti and a great part of their castles, and brought them so low that the following February, not being able to oppose him, they made peace according to M. Cane’s pleasure, and promised to restore the Ghibellines to Padua; and this they did.7
Among the writers of newsletters from which Villani drew his history were Florentine merchants: he was a banker as well as a diplomat, and so moved in the mercantile world. The fall of Acre to the Egyptian Mamluks in 1291 is recorded ‘as it was related to us by trustworthy fellow-citizens of our own, and merchants which were in Acre at that time’.8 Of the plague from the Christian Black Sea ports of Tana and Trebizond in 1347, Matteo writes: ‘And by news of our citizens worthy of trust who were in those countries . . .’9 His sources were merchants in the north, on whose credibility he insists.
It was perhaps Villani’s practical experience in the mercantile world, weighing commerce and goods at a distance, that shaped his scepticism towards news reports, despite his occasional credulity. Elsewhere he writes, ‘We heard from Genoese merchants, men worthy of faith, who had received news from those countries, that some time before this pestilence, in the area of upper Asia, there came forth from the earth or fell from the sky a huge fire that extended towards the West . . .’ Though sometimes, when sources could not be corroborated or compared, he offered the fragments he had: ‘And, from the news we could get . . .’10
The plague would kill Villani in 1348. The penultimate section of his final volume reports that on 25 January 1347[8] there were earthquakes in Venice, Padua, Bologna and Pisa. There were worse earthquakes further north, in Friuli and Bavaria, ‘but to tell the truth and not err in our treatise, truly we will insert the copy of the letter sent from there by some of our Florentine merchants worthy of trust . . .’ Villani’s final entry, then, is the short, factual paragraphs of this newsletter:
You have heard of various and dangerous earthquakes that have happened in this country, which have done the greatest harm. They occurred in the year of our Lord 1348, according to the calculation of the church, first year of the indiction,11 but according to the calculation of the Annunciation, still in the year 1347, on the 25th day of January,
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453 on the day of Friday, the day of the conversion of Saint Paul, eight and a quarter hours after vespers, which comes in the fifth hour of the night, and lasted for several hours, the like of which no one living can remember.
And:
Lemborgo castle, which is in the mountains, was fiercely shaken; all unmade, its ruins were moved by the tremors ten miles from the place where it first stood. A very great mountain, near the road which led to Dorestagno [Arnoldstein] lake, split and was broken in half by a great ravine, destroying the said road.
And Ragni [Rain] and Vedrone [Federaun], two castles with more than 50 hamlets in the domain of Gorizia, near the river Gieglia [Gail], were ruined and buried under two mountains, and nearly all the people there perished.12
News and history here intermingle, with written news flowing directly into the writing of history, though without sloughing off the utility, content and form of the newsletters of medieval merchants. Such letters were not only intended for merchants.
In the Riccardis and Villanis we can find many of the key features of news through to 1800: discrete, heterogeneous reports from international sources are assembled; documents are copied, sometimes without rewriting; sources, including locations, are specified; credibility is assessed. These practices, and a congeries of others that developed alongside them to organize the information that news culture proliferated, can be seen in the hands of another fourteenthcentury Italian merchant.
Managing the News: Francesco di Marco Datini
News, as we have said, was fundamental to trade, and a good deal of medieval trade was international, and so depended on news from abroad. Sometimes merchants conscientiously improvised means of sending news, sometimes this happened through everyday activity.
These practices coalesced between 1300 and 1500, and it became clearer what merchants needed to do. They had to write plainly, factually and briefly, with the information about place and date made prominent. By 1589 an English manual for merchants even offered guidance on letter writing, stressing the importance of ‘greater brevitie in their writings then commonly they are wont’, and supplying template letters to guide the reader through communications typical of their trade, including the helpful placeholder: ‘Here write your newes, if you have anie.’13 The practical side of news gathering – and the increasingly onerous task of managing the excess of news – can be seen in the unusually meticulous notebooks of the Italian merchant Francesco di Marco Datini (1335–1410).
Datini began his vocation in Avignon in 1350, working and trading for the papacy, shortly after losing both his parents to the same plague that killed Giovanni Villani. His early business was beleaguered by the financial problems and the acute labour shortage that followed the Black Death. Avignon was the seat of the papacy, but also a wellconnected trading post situated on the Rhône, an artery between northern and southern Europe. Datini returned to his home town of Prato in 1383, and then located his main business in Florence, around 17 kilometres away, in about 1386. This business was banking and the wool trade – like the Alberti company, contemporaries in Florence, whose accounts survive less comprehensively14 – but Datini’s trade was distinguished by its unusual diversity, and it reached across Europe and over the Mediterranean into north Africa. Like other merchants he relied on news for his everyday business: he needed to know about politics, conflict and war, and he needed to be able to follow and understand exchange rates, local markets, foreign customs and languages, international prices.15 He had to know when his goods were safely landed, and when they had been delayed. A number of Florentine banking houses had collapsed in the fourteenth century because of defaults in overseas investments, especially in England.
Datini was not inordinately curious, but he was interested in news insofar as it affected his two main concerns, God and profit. He kept several series of notebooks. He recorded snippets of news in his rough copybooks, his Quadernacci di ricordanze, alongside each day’s intake and outlay and various memoranda in no particular sequence.
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453
These were the least orderly of his notebooks: their contents were subsequently digested into a more systematic form in his Memoriali, and these in turn were superseded by the double-entry accounts of his Libri grandi. Double-entry bookkeeping had been invented (in Italy) by the 1340s, and it was in part owing to his diligent record-keeping that Datini earned his local sobriquet, il ricco, the rich. He also kept a Libro segreto, a book recording, for his private uses, the value of his business transactions and the shares of the partners of each of his firms; it also noted news, births and his personal reflections.16 These volumes were discovered, together with a cache of correspondence, in 1870, hidden behind the walls in his house in Prato. In all about 600 volumes and over 150,000 loose and bundled papers (not all of them Datini’s) were found immured during renovations of the house that is now the Casa Datini museum and archive.17
In the cities of Italy local news could be gathered by listening to the town crier – this might be news of important weddings, deaths, crimes and so on – and formal news of the comune (the municipality or city state) by listening to the officials who travelled with trumpets on horseback announcing the judgements of the courts and government.18 But in the mid-fourteenth century international news was harder to come by. Datini, like his peers, developed professional links with other merchants and with his factors and managers overseas, in France, England and Spain, as well as in other Italian city states. Before the introduction of crown and state postal services, larger trading companies used their own couriers, or borrowed the services of other companies by reciprocal agreement. Smaller companies relied on larger ones. Datini’s employees could find themselves acting as couriers, transporting important and confidential documents without the assistance of staging posts. In late medieval Europe this courier post became formalized through agreements between companies into an international postal system, using merchants’ employees, couriers, riders (cavalari ) and ships, to carry bags of letters, or scarselle, between major trading cities. The earliest was established between Avignon and Florence (corresponding to Datini’s trading interests) in 1457.19 These were open to the public: non-merchants could pay to use them, though they would receive their letters after the merchants had received theirs. Among Datini’s quaderni are tall, narrow
notebooks recording letters sent to various traders, the cost, and the dates of dispatch and receipt.20 From them we learn that his letters from Prato to Genoa (183 kilometres) and to Venice (199 kilometres) took between five and seven days, travelling at about 1.5 kph.21
Like Philip II of Spain (1527–98), another unflagging correspondent, Datini was a micromanager, hence his unusually rich archive. He wrote all letters with his own hand, and advised of the importance not only of careful bookkeeping but also of keeping pen and ink close. He recognized the drudgery: ‘It is my intention . . . always to remain a common scrivener, like an old horse in harness.’22 Because of the risk of interception – manuscript culture was free from censorship in the form of pre-publication licensing, unlike printed books, but letters were always liable to interception and opening, whether carried by private couriers or public post23 – he observed the common practice of sending multiple copies by different routes. He instructed one manager to bid his two employees to ‘write often to you . . . and also to write to every other place, that I may get their letters often. They are two; let one, that is Tieri, write a letter, and Checco make 3 or 4 copies and send them in every direction.’ His own letters were sealed in a scarsella carried upon the messenger’s belt. Despite such precautions, one of his correspondents advised him ‘It is wiser . . . to keep silence than to send tidings, and in especial not to speak against a man’s own Commune.’24 Already there were concerns about news, secrecy and public information.
Not only governments presented risks to the merchant. Danger also lay among commercial rivals, so Datini advised his factors to rely only on loyal friends: ‘For there are many who strive to seize letters that pass through their hands, to read them . . . It is better . . . always to hold some letters in readiness, and when you find a friend about to set forth, deliver them unto him, saying, “Give this into the hand of such a one, and of no other”.’25 Cooperation between members of the same guild had its limits, and the value of news lay in its scarcity and its timeliness. One merchant, Paolo da Certaldo (1320–70), advised that it was prudent for a merchant sharing a messenger initially to read his own letters, and understand their commercial implications, and only then distribute others’ arriving in the same scarsella : ‘For those letters might hold matters that would injure
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453 your trade, and thus the service you had done to a friend might turn to your own disfavour.’26
Much in this picture remained unchanged for later merchants. What’s distinctive about Datini is his personal labour in this correspondence and its organization. Two centuries later he would have been assisted by developing postal services and the widespread circulation of commercial newsletters. Nonetheless, he was able to lean upon the mercantile consortia that arranged scarsella posts between Barcelona, Bruges, Milan, Paris, London and Florence, and benefit from the news they shared.
A Formal Newsletter:
The Morosinis in 1419
Venice was a hub of merchants and news. There the nobleman Antonio Morosini (b. 1363–8, d. 1434 or later) compiled his Cronaca, a chronicle of the city’s history from the eleventh century to the present. Like Villani’s, Morosini’s chronicle absorbs recent news as it approaches his own times, and this can be seen in a letter he sent in 1419 to his nephew Biagio Dolfin, the Venetian consul in Alexandria. The early parts of this letter correspond closely with the chronicle; the middle section differs from it, and is confused in places, apparently incorporating news he has heard and read but not yet fully digested. The chronicle’s account, more precise in names and geography, was written at a greater distance and after more news or conferring of news.
The third section of Morosini’s letter to his nephew, however, has a different form: it consists of short paragraphs of heterogeneous news from various sources. The paragraphs indicate dates, albeit unevenly, and sometimes the place of origin of the news (‘by the last letters we have from Bruges’). They are raw and factual, not developed into narrative accounts, and they do not appear in the chronicle. There is news of an ambassador from Cremona, of the pope, of the siege of Genoa, news from Hungary, England, Albania. Morosini writes about broader economic matters, about taxes and departed galleys, but his newsletter to his nephew is not exclusively or even primarily
concerned with financial news. It contains no discussion of his own business, and entirely lacks personal information, though it concludes with greetings sent from his two other nephews, Marco and Alban. It is a general newsletter in a form that would shape the business of news in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.27
This presentation contrasts with letters that Dolfin received from other merchants in this same year. One sent by Biagio’s cousin Marco Morosini contains economic and more general news directly related to his own profession and useful to a consul overseas: ‘This [pepper] rose from an original value of 84 ducats to 88 ½ [ducats] with the arrival of the galleys. However, it has now decreased to 82, because of the aforesaid letters of our ambassadors, and could decrease even further to 80. On the other hand, if an agreement can be reached it would rise to 100.’28 The letter contains personal information too, in part because Dolfin was conducting business on Marco’s behalf in Alexandria. This is specifically a merchant’s newsletter in a way that Antonio’s is not.
A third letter, sent from Crete by another merchant, Giacomo Bragadin, consists of news from Venice and instructions regarding his own business, which Dolfin was also looking after. ‘At this time by ship nothing has come to us, except that from Venice of 13 December; I have a copy of the news which I will send to you, as you will see immediately below.’29 He has copied a newsletter received from Venice, and added other news, including personal business and instructions. Again, this is a conventional merchant’s newsletter, blending personal and international news, financial and political news.
Antonio Morosini’s letter stands out because it is neither a merchant’s letter, nor a personal one, but that of a factor of news, copied from multiple sources, paragraph by paragraph. The latter parts of it closely resemble an avviso, as the form would later be called in Italy. And by Antonio’s day newsmongers already had a reputation for unreliability. Dolfin received a fourth, more personal letter in 1419, sent from Venice by Alban Morosini, Marco’s brother. Alban warns his cousin:
I have read one [letter] of my barber, signor Antonio, who writes you much news but also many lies, which were passed on to him. And so
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453
he writes you what he hears. But I advise you that you should not trust such rumours (zanze ), which I am afraid could drive him crazy one day; as he already has been because of his chronicle. So please don’t show or read in public those letters which in your judgement should be kept silent.30
Alban advises that Antonio’s ‘barber’s news’ may be unreliable, and so should not be publicly passed on, as this might damage Dolfin’s credit in Alexandria. News was an important currency for consuls and diplomats, and Alban warns that Antonio has already been in trouble once. Recent news passed on without trust or confirmation could incur suspicion: it is ‘zanze’, Alban says. Could this be a plural form of zanza, a villain or swindler (though strictly the plural form should remain zanza )? Or could it be an obsolete word describing the buzzing of mosquitoes (zanzare )? News buzzes, as we see throughout Europe (chapter 12), and Alban’s distaste for and discomfort with the relaying of news without sufficient scrutiny are hedged against its excess. Stop and confer, digest, ruminate, confirm – otherwise it’s gossip and rumour.
Antonio’s ‘difficulties’ were his censure in 1418 by the Senate for his chronicle. On 7 July the Senate commanded him to hand over his books, for ‘many things are contained that are burdensome to our government’. Shortly thereafter they ordered the burning of several pages, ‘in which there are noted certain matters causing scandal’. Oddly, there is no evidence of pages torn from the surviving manuscript. What the offending material was is unclear, but it appears that the heart of the problem was Morosini’s access to official documents. His chronicle was based on official sources, which gave it something in common with the semi-official chronicles promoted by cities at this time, but also on news reports and less robust sources. The later parts in particular depended more on what he had himself heard or observed (which is why it is sometimes referred to as a diary). The potential offence, or ‘scandal’, to the Senate was twofold. First, Morosini risked divulging secrets of state, touching a raw nerve in the secretive Venetian government; secondly, he was mixing those confidential yet reliable sources with news acquired elsewhere, undermining the official with hearsay and buzz.31 Hence Alban’s advice to
Dolfin: be careful about making Antonio’s news public, because it could get you into trouble.
We can see a nascent set of conventions for spreading news established by 1420, and perhaps as early as 1300: letters, exchanged among Italian merchants, containing short paragraphs, indicating at the start the date and the location of origin of the news, using a formula such as ‘For news arrived from Vicenza . . .’32 Later newsletters would employ a different vocabulary, including and especially the resonant word avviso (or aviso ). Antonio in his newsletter and chronicle, and Marco in his letter, consistently use the word nuove. Marco writes: ‘The news (novità ) of the king of England . . .’ and ‘Of the news (nuove ), and briefly’.33 While in the chronicle Antonio writes, ‘We had the news (nuove ) on the 20th of the present month of June 1405 . . .’, and, ‘We received news (nuove ) in Venice’.34 Alban uses avviso in a different sense, meaning to give counsel. News is compassed by the broad terms nuove and novità, appropriately so, as the genres of the newsletter have not yet coalesced, and they mean ‘news’ in the widest sense.35 Antonio understood, however, a set of practices for sending news that would prove enormously influential in the sixteenth century. There was always news, of course, though the matter and the media changed. But these few fragments, with their care regarding place, time, authority and method, suggest that its communication in late medieval Europe may have been more formal and more structured, and significantly more dynamic, than the records, and our stories, generally reveal.
Speed of News (I)
The Morosini family correspondence reveals a little about the speed at which news moved. The linear distance from Venice to Alexandria is 2,199 kilometres.36 Marco’s letter took seventy-seven days, Antonio’s fifty-four days and Alban’s thirty-seven days, averaging 1.19 kph, 1.7 kph and 2.48 kph respectively. Marco’s letter was evidently delayed; Alban’s fortunate; but these two suggest the range of speeds of news crossing the Mediterranean in 1419. Bragadin’s letter took twenty days; the distance from Rethymno on Crete to Alexandria
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453 is approximately 685 kilometres (the ship would have travelled further); the speed was 1.43 kph.
We can compare this with thirty items of news (concerning twentyseven events) moving long distances across Britain between 1437 and 1502. These figures are not point-to-point, as the European ones are (the distances actually travelled across the Mediterranean were much longer than given above), but based upon road distance, which makes them more accurate, but also has the effect of making them seem relatively faster when calculated as kilometres per hour. Specific times for the departure and arrival of the news are seldom available, so speed has to be calculated merely on date range, which leads to misleading variations, especially over shorter distances. All examples involve special messengers, so these figures reveal the maximum speed the infrastructure permitted, not the speed at which news ordinarily travelled.37
The thirty examples range from 1.82 kph (in this case there may have been an intentional delay before informing Edward V of the death of his father) to an improbable 7.49 kph (news of the Battle of Stoke Field, by Newark-on-Trent, in 1487, where we know the messenger travelled through the night). The average is 4.05 kph; discounting seven cases where the figures seem unreliable takes us to 3.66 kph, a pace reflecting the conditions of the roads and the lack of street lighting. There are indications of an increase in the speed at which news of the most important events travelled. The first ten, in 1437–62, moved at an average of 3.25 kph; the next, in 1465–84, at an average of 4.04 kph; and the last, in 1484–1502, at an average of 4.85 kph. Removing again the apparently unreliable examples leaves us with: 1437–62, at 3 kph; 1465–84, at 3.53 kph; 1484–1502, at 4.46 kph. The velocity of news travelling on British roads increased.
News of the siege of Negroponte, now Chalcis on Euboea, travelled around the Mediterranean in 1470 at between 1.5 and 2.5 kph, and the same news travelled from Venice to Rome at 4 kph (point-topoint). In 1514 news of the Battle of Chaldiran, in the north-west corner of present-day Iran, travelled towards Europe at around 1.6–2 kph. Later, in 1571, news of the Battle of Lepanto travelled around the Mediterranean and into France at average speeds of between 1.9 and 4.92 kph, with the fastest route being Venice to Rome, at 8.2 kph,
twice what it had been a century earlier. News could travel by sea very swiftly, though the speeds, and the news itself, could be unreliable. Land travel was steadier and more cumbersome. Though we can see acceleration, it is selective, and by no means linear. In the 1680s the speed of news from Vienna to France, no longer only by courier but also by regular post, was 1.72–3.9 kph. Taken together, however, these numbers indicate the range of speeds at which particular, important news could travel, the limits of horse power, sail and roads, the impediments of landscape.38
Letters of News in Fifteenth- Century England
For a contrasting picture we can turn to a small group of nonmerchants far from the entrepôts of Venice and Florence, in an insular region within a group of islands on the periphery of north-west Europe: the Paston family of Norfolk. There was no regular postal service in England, and the royal carrier service was at that time accessible only to the king. Adult male illiteracy was probably around 90 per cent, and female illiteracy even higher (pp. 56–9, below).
Letters were for statesmen, scholars and merchants. Nevertheless the Pastons, together with their friends and servants, exchanged a good deal of correspondence, and their communications express their interest in news and their resourcefulness in conveying it. This body of writing is unparalleled in England, and provides moving insights into the private exchanges of a family dealing with personal challenges as well as the political turmoil of the Wars of the Roses. These letters make frequent reference to the means of carriage. For example, the aggrieved John Paston (1421–66) wrote to his wife Margaret (d. 1484) in August 1465:
I mervyll that I here no tidyngges from yow hough ye have do at the assisses. The berer of this lettir is a comon carier, and was at Norwich on Satirday, and brought me lettirs from other men, but your servaunts inquere nat diligently after the comyng of cariers and other men. Wretyn at London, the Wednesday next after Lammes day.
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453
He added, perhaps reprovingly, ‘Ye shall have lettirs of me this weke.’39 Some years later the lawyer and steward Thomas Andrew wrote to John’s brother William Paston, ‘And my lord or ye send me eny letter, ye may send it me be John a More, this brynger, if he com agayne, or els be Fox wyff if her husbond be nat gone to London.’40 Sometimes a letter specified that the carrier was not available for a return message, implying that on other occasions they were. Logistics troubled correspondents. Letters frequently conclude with the expectation of a response by ‘the next messenger’ or ‘the next messenger or carrier’.
The Pastons were able to use three kinds of carrier: informal (such as a friend, a servant, or a servant of a friend); a paid, professional carrier; and ‘loderers and carterers’, who transported heavier goods but could also be called on to bear letters. The letters refer to 120 named carriers, at least three of whom were women, and another twentynine unnamed; and, in addition to these, seventeen intermediaries who might receive a letter if the addressee could not be found.41 The identity of the carrier mattered. The Pastons’ involvement in national politics during the dynastic wars – when the ruling family changed several times, along with the Pastons’ allegiances – made secrecy occasionally crucial. A reliable, personal carrier not only made safe delivery more probable, but could also supplement the explicit content of a letter. Margaret refers to this otherwise invisible practice: ‘I trowe the berar of this shall telle more by mowthe, as he shall be enfourmed, of the revell [disturbance] in this cuntré.’42 Sometimes, then, the courier was part of the message, and the letter they bore was only part of the story. We will find the same with ballad singers, who both performed and explicated the commodities they sold (pp. 244–6, below).
News was intermittently vital to the Pastons, most clearly when they were entangled in lawsuits or crises of succession. One of John Paston’s regular suppliers of national news was the Norfolk lawyer Thomas Plaiter or Playter, whose letters were an admixture of legal proceedings and political conflict and battles. Here Playter supplies news in a typical fashion, though the news itself is unusually urgent:
Item, as for tydyng, it is noysed and told for trouth of men of worchip and other, that the Erle of Wylchyre is taken, Doctour Moorton and
Doctor Makerell, and be brought to the Kyng at York. Maister William also spak with a man that say hem.
Item, ser, I herd of Ser John Borceter and Christofer Hanson that Herry the Sext is in a place in York-schire is calle Corcombre; such a name it hath, or muche lyke. And there is sege leyde a-bowte, and dyvers squyers of the Erle of Northumberlandes and gadered them togeder a v or vi ml [5,000 or 6,000] men to byger [bicker] with the sege, that in the mene while Herry the Sexte mygh[t] have ben stole a-way at a lytyl posterne on the bak syde; at whiche byker ben slayn iii ml [3,000] men of the North.43
Playter’s next letter notes, ‘And as for tytyngys, in good feyth we have non, save the Erle of Wylchir his hed is sette on London Brigge.’44
The Pastons’ sources of news included royal proclamations and statutes, published by being cried aloud and posted in marketplaces.45 But mostly the Pastons’ sources were not things they copied, but things they had witnessed. They were usually careful to check things they’d not seen or heard for themselves.46 Elsewhere in Europe correspondents benefitted from a growing network of semi-formalized correspondence, which promised a kind of reliability. Playter, by contrast, had to extemporize means of writing news that sounded true, a voice and a set of verbal formulae, leaning heavily on those used when speaking. The phrase ‘noysed and told for trouth of men of worchip and other’ indicates the basis on which he believes the news to be true: the status and authority of men of worship is transferred to the report and makes it creditable. He carefully states where he is unsure: noting that the news has been passed on, and qualifying his uncertainties with ‘such a name it hath, or muche lyke’. He fumbles for how to introduce these facts: ‘Item, as for tydyng’ is awkward, but it purposefully signals the kind of sentence he is going to write: this is news, not personal news but that which has been heard at a distance. The Middle English word tiding or tidings meant both the event and the report of that event, and here it signifies either or both. A similar doubleness attaches to other words in the news lexicon, including ‘news’ itself (p. 303, below). It is as much the manner of reporting as the quality of the event itself that makes an event news. Similar improvisation around how effectively to write news appears
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453
in a letter written by John Daubeney, another family retainer, to John Paston on 3 July 1462:
Item, ser, if please, suche tydyngys as I here of I send you word. My lord of Warwek hathe be in Skotlon an take a castell of the Skottys; and upon thys ther came the Quene of Skottys with other lordys of her contré, as ye shall here the namys, in basetry [ambassadry] to my seyd Lord of Werwek, and a trews is take be-twyx thys and Seynt Bertylmew Day in Auguste. Thes is the last tydyngys that I knowe.47
Daubeney negotiates his communication with a verbal genuflexion, an acknowledgement of his social inferiority (sir, if it please you . . .). It reflects patterns of speech, and makes the communication of news an act of service, one for which there is as yet no neutral, transparent voice. Daubeney is a less sophisticated writer than Playter, but both use the curious word item . From around 1400 item introduced a new fact, statement or article in an enumerative list such as a household book or inventory. In Elizabethan English – over a hundred years after Playter and Daubeney were writing – it came to be used to specify an entry in an account or a register or a clause in a document.48 This later meaning is perhaps already in play here. In effect these writers turn the news into units that they mark by ‘item’. The modern sense of ‘item’ as a piece of news, sometimes qualified as a ‘news item’, appeared much later, but it is close to Playter’s and Daubeney’s sense: they divide the news up into appropriate units.49
These letters pass on family news and political news affecting the fortunes of the family, but, unlike their merchant contemporaries, little international news, except insofar as national news had an international dimension. Thus John Paston II (1442–79) wrote to his namesake younger brother on 16 April 1473: ‘As for tydyngys, there was a truse taken at Brussellys about the xxvi daye off Marche last past be-twyn the Duke of Borgoyn and the Frense Kyngys imbassatorys and Master William Atclyff for the Kyng here . . . Item, there be in London many flyeng talys [tales] seyng that ther shold be a werke, and yit they wot not howe.’50 This was an event that directly affected the Pastons, not only because their country was at peace, but because their support for the Lancastrians had disadvantaged them under the
Yorkist Edward IV, who had signed this peace; and because around this time John had a financial interest in Calais. However, there is no evidence of appetite for international news simply because it was interesting, or in the pursuit of news for its own sake. In the letters exchanged in 1453 we find news of the English royal family, but none of the Fall of Constantinople.
A hundred years later, a similar dynamic inhabits the diary of another Englishman, a London-based merchant tailor. Henry Machyn (1496 or 1498–1563) kept a diary between 1550 and 1563; not a personal diary like Morosini’s, but a day-by-day chronicle of the times of his city. Machyn describes in a brisk style the public and political events in and around London. He doesn’t identify sources, and his reports are probably all based on what he’s seen or heard. He records numerous proclamations, by the king, queen and lord mayor, apparently considering them central to history. He records, for example, the 1563 proclamation for killing London’s dogs, for fear they spread plague: ‘The fourth day of August was another proclamation . . . my lord mayor that there is one man hired to kill dogs, as many as he can find in the street. And has a fee for looking every day and night.’51 Machyn seldom refers to ‘news’. Over the fourteen years and 162 surviving leaves he uses the word only four times; there are twenty instances of the word tidings, usually spelled ‘tydyng’, and fifty-six instances of proclamation. Tidings can be local or international, and they can be rumour, such as when he hears tidings that there are nine tribes that have been hiding since they were driven out of Egypt, who are now ‘ready to set on the Great Turk with great armies of men’.52 He records the rebellion and execution of Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1554, one of the many executions that followed the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary in 1553, and, tantalizingly, two men being punished for seditious libel in 1554: ‘The twenty-first day of April were two men set on the pillory in Cheapside for speaking seditious words and false lies against the Queen and her council. And one had his ears nailed to the pillory.’53 He does not note what the libel concerned; which was prudent, as he might have been accused of committing the libel merely by copying it. There is some news from overseas – which he refers to as both news and tidings – though it is its English dimension that concerns Machyn:
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453
The tenth day of January [1558] doleful news came to England and to London that the French had won Calais, the which was the heaviest tidings to London and to England that ever was heard of. For like a traitor it was sold and delivered unto them, the . . . day of January. The Duke of Guise, chief captain, and every man discharged the town, carrying nothing with him.54
Despite being a merchant tailor, and therefore involved, if indirectly, with imports and international markets, Machyn doesn’t record commercial or financial news that affected his business. Though attentive to current affairs, he was not connected to the international news trade at this time; there are no references to written or printed sources, no gazettes or avvisi, no news of foreign origin.
After the Fall: Marin Sanudo
A stirring of news in a Venetian diary reflects the shift that followed the Fall of Constantinople, at least in the more connected areas of Europe. Marin Sanudo or Sanuto (1466–1536) was a Venetian patrician and member initially of the Maggior Consiglio (or Great Council) and subsequently of the Senate of the republic. His famous Diarii, extending over fifty-eight manuscript volumes spanning from 1496 to 1533, were projected to become a history of the republic, compiled from news reports, works from his substantial library and things he saw with his own eyes, including debates in government.55 He never succeeded in writing his envisaged history, but instead left something much more like a news chronicle, focused on political events and things he had heard and read. In his opening paragraph, he writes: ‘Therefore, wanting to make a memorial, here I have abandoned all order of composition, describing all the very true news (nove ) as it arrives.’ He does this to protect these news from oblivion.56 Daily he records the letters received at Venice from all over Italy, from Constantinople (as the Venetians still called it), from Corfu, from Aleppo. These letters are mostly diplomatic, and some of them in code (‘sub enigma’), though other letters are private.57 Some days there are many letters, and he copies or paraphrases them with little
or no comment. He imparts nove and avis, and makes no effort, in his unadorned style, to disguise the timeliness of the information: ‘From Constantinople, by our bailo signor Tomà Contarini, given in Pera on 8 February. As of the thirty-first of the present month he wrote, this time by the Florentine messenger: news of the slave of the Lord still has not arrived in this land, and once it comes, we will gather what has been imposed on him.’58
These are typical formulae: A letter from Damascus, sent by our consul Carlo di Prioli on 8 April; A summary of a letter from Padua, by our rhetor signor Almorò Donado; From Rome, another from the same, by someone else; From Germany, from signor Gasparo Contarini, orator, sent from Vormatia (Worms) on 25 April. Or: ‘From Constantinople, from signor Piero Zen, orator and vice bailo, sent on 3 April, received on 7 May, in the morning. On the 30th past I wrote, and on Monday, following his divan, Ibrahim the Magnificent, summoned me . . .’59 Istanbul and Venice are approximately 1,433 kilometres distant; at thirty-four days, Zen’s news travelled at an average speed of 1.76 kph.
Sanudo’s diary shows the richness of written news communications in and around the early sixteenth-century Mediterranean. It speaks of the importance of ambassadors to news media; and as a senator Sanudo is careful to refer to ambassadors by their highly stratified titles, rhetor, orator, consul, bailo. The diary reveals the significance of place names and dates in the culture of news. Behind these is an imagined geography, and inhabiting it a particular understanding of speed, direction, means of travel and, ultimately, reliability. Sanudo copies reports naturally, as they slip from port to Senate and beyond, into public manuscript culture, piazza and barber’s shop.
Sanudo evokes the appetite for news, and the excitement of receiving it:
From Rome, came letters from our orator Lando, the first in cypher. During his journey he was indisposed by the gout. And first, that the Pope, having arrived in Rome on the 30th, received letters from Ragusa with a copy of the letter sent from the Sultan at Constantinople about his victory obtained over the Sophy [the ruler of Safavid Iran]; and how the Pope first called congregation, then afterwards had lunch, and then
Before the Fall: Letters of News and Commerce to 1453 lastly sent to all of the ambassadors and read them this letter, saying how he had not slept that night because of the bad news for Christianity. He said that we must prepare to defend the faith, and not wait, and that he wanted to unify the Christian princes. Therefore, all of the ambassadors are to write to their rulers about this and send a copy of their news and the letters obtained, and for his part he will use every means to defend the church and will write briefs to all the rulers and send legates, etc. Item, our ambassador was not able to attend at that time, but he went later and [was given] there a copy of the letter, ut supra [as above], which he sent and which will be copied here with this. Item, he writes another communiqué on the subject of the Spaniards, and about the terms of the accord being discussed with the Emperor, saying we have all our own States, so that it’s possible to unite all Christianity as one and make an armada against the infidels, etc. And that same letter was read to the Council of Ten, and the whole College [a smaller body within the Senate] believed that such a thing was true, which before the avviso from Ragusa they did not believe. And etiam [also] another detailed letter was read, firstly, a friend of Zuan Jacamo Caroldo writes from Rome with news of these Turkish affairs, and it is said that the Turkish Sultan wants to come to Italy next April . . . 60
Sanudo had access to a rich and dense flow of international news, not commercial but political and military. He refers to these as avvisi, a word that could mean advice, notice or warning, but here means something specific: the genre of manuscript newsletter that informed the Venetian state, and that informs his diary. The flow of avvisi moved news around sixteenth-century Europe, forming the infrastructure of a transnational network.
Avvisi and the Genius of the Paragraph
Between 1300 and 1550, Europe’s supply of news was progressively systematized and professionalized. There was no revolution. Journalists, newsmongers, reportisti or gazzettieri were not invented at any particular moment. Instead a gradual transformation took place, founded on one of the central, defining characteristics in the history of news: improvisation. Innovation comes with improvisation, and this is what we see when Antonio Morosini supplied a letter of general impersonal news to the Venetian consul in Alexandria, and when Johann Carolus printed the first weekly newspaper in Strassburg in 1605 (pp. 189–96, below).
Writers devised methods of obtaining news and copying and organizing it on the page. Some innovations were successful, some not. But by 1550 a series of enduring conventions had become embedded in the written communication of news. These meant that the contents of the earliest printed newspapers would look and read very much like the elite manuscript newsletters of a century earlier, and these in turn resembled a merchant’s letter of a century before that. How news were reproduced differed, and this in turn influenced who read them and how they were read, but textually they were almost indistinguishable. Continuous improvisation negotiated a series of obstacles – time, space, language, coherence, certainty – and formulated, more unconsciously than consciously, a series of approaches to the news: copying or reproduction, managing excess, establishing trust, bundling, and working through networks. That is the story of this book.
Time and space were impediments to which ameliorations were found. As in any long-distance relationship, news that travels far faces
the perennial problem of trust. Confidence in the truthfulness of news lies partly in the authority of the source, and when that source is not physically present, that authority needs to be transferred. This might involve, for example, the recognition of the social status of the witness. In English culture at this time an earl had more credit, and so was more credible, than a commoner. News reports note the rank of the source where pertinent; later, relevant professional expertise would be recorded. In 1660s and 1670s Britain the criteria for ‘proof’ of a scientific experiment comprised not only reproducibility but its communicability in writing. Something like a ‘virtual witnessing’ of the experiment could take place through publication. Scientific publications carefully identified those who were present when an experiment was performed, often listing them in order of status, because the more exalted the witnesses the more trustworthy the report.1 And eyewitnessing was and remains an mark of credibility: ‘I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in the bottle . . .’2 The use of citizen journalism – including today witnesses with smartphones tweeting experiences of disasters and terrorist attacks, and those tweets being harvested and promoted by news outlets – is partly justified by the faith in what the eye, and now especially the camera, sees.
There was another way of indicating veracity, which was more or less antithetical. Much news was anonymous, and anonymity had its own potency. The flows of news that crossed early modern Europe consisted in anonymous, impersonal paragraphs in an inexpressive voice that made no explicit claim to truth. Yet that very anonymity and impersonal nature afforded a degree of authority, reliability and authenticity, particularly when accompanied by evidence of where and when news originated. Authority was removed from the person to a reliable system. The system acknowledged its limitations and imperfections, and encouraged careful management (chapters 13, 14). This chapter tells the story of the medium – the avviso – that was at the centre of such a communicative network.
The word avviso exists in most European vernaculars, though its precise meaning varies, and there were numerous other words with similar meanings, such as gazette and neue Zeitungen (chapter 11). The Italian avviso signified ‘news’ (it was grammatically singular; avvisi is the plural), though we also see the word advisi. The English
translator John Florio defined it in 1598 as ‘advertisement, advise, consideration, notice, an opinion, account, or a seeming’, and in 1611, in his revised dictionary, as ‘an advise, an advertisement. Also a seeming or deeming a thought.’ (‘Advertisement’ did not at this time carry its commercial meaning: rather it was a notification or notice, usually written.)3 Avviso had another meaning, however, the generic form: so avviso was both the news, and the written or printed medium by which multiple pieces of news were conveyed. In Venice – which had and still has its own distinct dialect – reporto had the same meaning as avviso, a piece of news, or a thing bearing multiple pieces of news. So the newsletters written by newswriters and ambassadors were a recognized genre, the avviso. The avviso borrowed some practices from merchants’ letters, seen in the previous chapter, and was developed more or less simultaneously. It was not invented, however, but collaboratively improvised and copied. The end product was a collective work of genius, which was used to supply news for centuries.
Resident Diplomats
Alongside the merchants we have seen exchanging news before the Fall of Constantinople, another profession trafficked in news, and shaped the paragraphs and pages of news that made the avviso – ambassadors. Flows of news extensively altered in the late fifteenth century – the time of the Hundred Years’ Ottoman–Croatian War, the Austrian–Hungarian War, the Burgundian Wars, the English Wars of the Roses and many other, shorter wars – with the development of resident diplomats. Italian states began to send ambassadors to other states not for a particular set of negotiations but for more extended periods of time.4 The Spanish king Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516) established resident embassies in Rome, Venice, London, Brussels and at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor.5
In 1379 the Venetian Senate sent Pietro Cornaro to Milan to forge a league between Venice, Milan and others. The Great Council’s nomination of Cornaro for the role gives some idea of both the remit and the practices expected of the diplomat’s expanded role. He was to be:
Paragraph syndic, actor, proctor, and procurer of their affairs and special nuncio – in the widest possible sense . . . for all the causes, quarrels, controversies, and legal actions on behalf of the said doge and councils and commune, namely to negotiate, stipulate and conclude peace, and make and strengthen treaties, pacts and agreements with every lord, commune, college, community and individual both public and private, together and separately, about every single issue that appertains to or could be of interest to the accomplishment and good of the happy league and unity . . . And this commission should have regard also to all the other issues that the said ambassador would consider necessary: he can write, make and receive charters and notarial deeds, all provided with the appropriate stipulations, promises, renunciations, penalties, terms, securities and clauses . . . And more generally he will be allowed to provide and do everything else that could prove itself to be necessary and appropriate in and about these matters, and in all the matters that are dependent on and connected to these, and also to do everything resulting necessary and essential to these legal acts and negotiations, even though these last actions would require a special commission. And the same lord doge and councils gathered for this purpose could – if necessary – concede and give to the said syndic and proctor a full, free and general commission – even with special power when required – and a full, free and general power and governance in and about these matters, and in everything dependent on and connected with these same matters.6
A significant delegation of responsibility to someone living at a distance. While the commission empowers Cornaro only to address matters pertaining to the league, it gives him explicit scope to act in ways that would previously have ‘require[d] a special commission’.
Collecting and dispersing information was essential to this expanded role. By the mid-fifteenth century some of those engaged in diplomacy had begun to think that the need for local knowledge, and to master flows of information, made longer embassies more effective.7 Over the next seventy years, especially in the Italian states, resident ambassadors became a routine way of conducting relations. They complemented merchants as disseminators of news. In 1488 a Roman diplomat wrote (gloatingly?) that ‘the resident ambassador from
Venice in Naples is recalled for sure, and no other will be appointed, except for their consul of the merchants, because they say that no important matters are now dealt with that could require an ambassador’.8 There wasn’t a standardized model for the ambassador. Papal ambassadors were distinct because they emerged out of other, older, ecclesiastical offices and also assumed some of the authority of the pope. Venice was unusual because of the large number of people who were responsible for conducting foreign policy, which also demanded exceptionally sophisticated record-keeping. Ambassadors to Istanbul received a pension from the Sultan, because they consented to the convenient fiction that they were in his employment; and communication with their home states in western Europe depended on the irregular travels of merchant ships.
News was the ambassadors’ currency. ‘You must be cautious in order to know and obtain news from all routes, and in all manners and forms’, Philip II of Spain instructed Diego Guzmán de Silva, his ambassador to Venice from 1571 to 1576.9 Philip developed an excellent information network, and was often apprised of foreign news before the ambassadors of the pertinent countries in Spain, thus putting them at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, in 1575, Luis de Requesens, Philip’s ambassador in Antwerp, wrote to Diego de ZÚñiga, the Spanish ambassador in Paris: ‘I do not know how your Lordship fares for letters from Spain; for myself, I have heard nothing from the king concerning the affairs of the Netherlands since 20th November last . . . His Majesty’s service has suffered greatly by it.’10 Ambassadors traded news locally, and sent back to their home states secret information on the circumstances and probable outcomes of current negotiations, and also more general information. On their return Venetian ambassadors were required (by a decree of the Great Council in 1268) to read aloud, and then deposit in the archive, a relazione – a report describing the political, military and economic culture, the strengths and weaknesses, of the place of their posting. These relazioni, intended for use by future diplomats, were officially privileged and secret, but nonetheless leaked to the public. They offered a general picture of the world useful to those in government, but were also in demand among curious Venetian citizens.
The interest of the wider public meant that some relazioni were
printed. Three collections of relazioni, with titles like Tesoro politico (Political treasure ), were printed in editions from 1589 through the 1610s and beyond; though not in Venice, where printing them was proscribed. Some were translated into Latin and published in Frankfurt and Cologne; there were French editions in 1608 and 1611; and probably others too. A taste can be found in the opening of a section giving ‘Instructions A. N. When Going as Ambassador to Switzerland’, taken from Political treasure, in which is contained relations, instructions, treatises and various discourses pertinent to the perfect understanding of reason of state (Vicenza, 1602):
From what we have been able to see and know through experience, these negotiations with the powerful Swiss lords are difficult, and the desired outcome uncertain, because of the multitude and number of persons with whom you have to negotiate at the same time, and in treating they hold diverse opinions for different reasons and with varying consequences: but the majority of the leaders and princes in these negotiations let themselves be guided by self-interest, though to quieten the people and the commoners, and to support each other, they defend everything that they negotiate, that it is for the public good, for peace, and for the conservation of their domains, countries and freedom.11
At the time relazioni were not translated into English, but John Florio listed the three collections as a source for the second edition of his Italian–English dictionary (1611).12 They crept into other texts too: the Venetian ambassador Ottavio Bon’s account of the seraglio or serail in the Topkapi Palace (Topkapı Sarayı ) in Istanbul appeared in Samuel Purchas’s massive compendium of travel writing Purchas His Pilgrimes in London in 1625, and then again in a 1650 pamphlet. Two examples show the nature, flavour and interest of the relazione. The first offers practical resources:
The Divan dayes are four every week: viz. Saturday, Sunday, Munday, and Tuesday: Upon whiche daies The Vizir azem [Chief Vizier ], with all the rest of the Vizirs, the two Cadileschers, of Græcia and Natolia (which are the chief over all the Cadees of those two Provinces); the three Desterdars (whose charge is to gather in the Kings revenues, and likewise to pay all his Souldiers, and others which have any
pension due unto them); the Reiskitawb (which is the Chancellor); the Nishawngee (that is, he which signeth commandments and letters with the Grand Signors mark); the Secretaries of all the Bashawes and of other great men; a great number of Clerks, which are alwayes attending at the door of the Divan ; the Chiaush Bashaw (who all that while that he is in the Seraglio carrieth a silver staffe in his hand;) And many Chiaushes, that at the Vizirs command they may be ready to be dispatched, with such orders as shall be given them, by him, to what place, or to whomsoever he pleaseth (For, they are those which are imployed in Ambassies; or in ordinary messages; to summon men to appear before the Bench; to keep close Prisoners; and in fine, to perform all businesses of that nature.) Upon those days I say, all the aforesaid Magistrates and Officers, from the highest to the lowest, are to be at the Divan by break of day.
The second shows information deployed as entertainment: Now in the womens lodgings, they live just as Nunnes do in great Nunneries: for these virgins, have very large rooms to live in: and their bedchambers will hold almost a hundred of them a piece. They sleep upon Sofaes, which are built longwise on both sides of the room, and a large space left in the midst to go to and fro about their business. Their beds are very course and hard (for the Turkes neither use featherbeds nor corded bedsteads) made of flocks of wooll: and by every ten virgins there lies an old woman: and all the night long there are many lamps burning, so that one may see plainly throughout the whole room: which doth both keep the young wenches from wantonness, and serve upon any occasion which may happen in the night. Near unto the said bedchambers they have their Bagnos for their use at all times: with many fountains out of which they are served with water: and above their chambers there are divers rooms, where they sit and sew: and there they keep their boxes, and chests in which they lay up their apparrell.13
There is also, for titillation disguised as education, a long description of the means by which the Sultan choses a sexual partner for a night from among the many slaves, created from rumour and speculation, mixing fact and fiction.14
Information about palace mores was essential to the ambassador’s work; but so was news of more worldly events, the battles, conflicts, leagues, coronations, natural disasters, trade and trade agreements. They gathered this through experience and local conversations, from merchants who heard news during their own travels or from other merchants, and from newsletters. Then the Venetian ambassadors fed it back to the Senate in their weekly reports. These reports contained general news and information, from their place of posting but also what they had gathered from further afield, which was intended to be immediately useful. Zaccaria Barbaro, the Venetian ambassador to Naples from 1471 to 1473, included in his weekly dispatches both things he had seen and excerpts from texts, including dispatches from other ambassadors, and numerous ‘lettere de’ merchadanti’ or merchants’ letters, an assembly of fragments from assorted sources and places, some brief.15
The weekly gathering of snippets of news was particularly important to Venice, which generated and systematically preserved a massive quantity of documentation. The centralization and bureaucratization of European states in the early modern period generally involved an increase in paperwork, and this was particularly true in Venice. Its republican government was concerned to exercise continuity in international relations while observing the principle of rotation of office. It prospered precisely because of trade, which involved the work not only of merchants, but also of diplomats making and preserving international agreements. And at the same time as multiplying sources of information, the Senate was concerned to preserve records in secrecy, and written documentation was suited to this. Whether or not the practice began in Venice, it was by the last two decades of the fifteenth century observed by other states, especially Rome, which had a rich network of ambassadors. Over the next century it would become common.
The correspondence of Raimondo de’ Raimondi de Soncino, Milanese ambassador in England at the end of the fifteenth century, shows the value of news from home. In a letter to his employer, Ludovico Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, dated 8 September 1497, he depicts news circulating at the court of Henry VII :
In many things I know the king here to be most wise, but above all because he is most thoroughly acquainted with the affairs of Italy, and