The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (22 page)

The first northern clients of the manuscript newsletters were mostly the princes and officials of the German court. Theirs at least are the collections that have survived: the strong bias towards commercial and political news in the surviving copies, however, hints strongly at a lively market among the patrician merchants of the south German cities. The largest surviving collection was that compiled by the merchant and banking family, the Fuggers of Augsburg.
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The Fuggers had profited massively from their close association with the Habsburgs in the first half of the sixteenth century. In later decades their commitment to Philip II left them more exposed and imperilled. To
protect their far-flung business interests the Fuggers built the most extraordinary news information service of the age.

To get the measure of this global news service we need to turn to twenty-seven neatly bound volumes that survive today in the National Library in Vienna.
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Each volume contains hundreds of items: issue after issue of the manuscript newsletters. The first volume in Vienna dates from 1569, but the Fugger news service seems to pre-date this. The Vatican archive in Rome has a set of earlier volumes dating from 1554, which had been the property of Ulrich Fugger. These had been presented by the family to the University of Heidelberg, before making their way to Rome when that wonderful library was plundered by Catholic armies during the Thirty Years War.
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The Vienna volumes comprise the archive of two brothers of a younger generation, Philip Eduard and Octavian Secundus, who took control of the interests of their father Georg after his unexpected death in 1569. Happily the young men could call upon a network of long-established commercial partners in every corner of Europe. It was David Ott, an Innsbruck merchant based in Venice, who put them in touch with two of the most reputable Venetian
novellanti
, the aforementioned Hieronimo Acconzaicco and Pompeo Roma, who provided a weekly service at the cost, in 1585 and 1586, of 113 florins. Ott had previously recommended Accozaioco to Hans Fugger, son of Anton, though with less success. In 1577 Hans complained to Ott that Accozaioco sent only rubbish: ‘all hot air and nothings’. He asked Ott to contract Juan Donato instead, since he had a better reputation.
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In fact, Accozaioco was still writing for the Fuggers two years later. The Venetian
avvisi
in the Vienna archive were despatched, and presumably read, in their original Italian.

This was a straightforward commercial transaction. From elsewhere in northern Europe the Fuggers received not only regular packages containing the local news-sheets, but a digest prepared by their local agent. The managers of the Fugger branch offices were persons of considerable standing in their own right, usually highly educated men from leading German patrician families. It fell to them not only to sift the reports for the most reliable news, but to see that those in Dutch were translated into German. The news writers frequently mentioned news reports they chose not to pass on, because they found them doubtful. ‘Although I have read other particulars, these are the ones that seem to me to be the best,’ wrote Christoph Winkelhofer, passing on news from Vienna.
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The newsletters archived by the Fuggers are not much concerned with the everyday staples of the news broadsheets: sensations, prophecies and wondrous tales. For these serious men, ‘worthy of writing’ meant political and economic news.

In 1586 the brothers Philip Eduard and Octavian Secundus entered into a partnership which contracted with Philip II for a five-year import licence of the Asian pepper trade. (This Portuguese monopoly had fallen to Spain since Philip's contested occupation of Portugal in 1580.) It was a risky new venture that required an expansion of the news service to include more regular reports from the Iberian Peninsula. The Welser factor in Lisbon took charge of arranging reports from the erstwhile Portuguese capital; a succession of agents in Spain organised compilations of news from Seville, Valladolid and Madrid. The development of the Asian trade also brought the first news reports direct from India. Many of these despatches from trusted agents consist of something rather different from the commercial newsletters of Venice. Here the local Fugger agents acted as a filter, applying their judgement to gauge the veracity of the reports they assembled, before they passed them on. But they also made sure that the originals, the raw data, made their way to Vienna. Even the most fanciful and speculative reports were useful in gauging the temper of the times.

Once they arrived in Vienna the Fugger brothers were generous in sharing the information that poured into their headquarters with every post. Weekly digests were prepared for both the Duke of Bavaria and Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol.
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Philip Eduard and Octavian Secundus even apparently allowed some of their news reports to be printed, especially the drawings which many of their correspondents included with their despatches. In 1585 the brothers contracted the Augsburg engraver Hans Schultes to make an illustrated broadsheet of a watercolour sent to them of the fortifications constructed by the Duke of Parma for the siege of Antwerp, the climax of his successful campaign of reconquest in Flanders and Brabant.
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This publication seems to have been extremely successful: these sorts of military diagrams had been an important vogue in the news market since the siege of Malta in 1565.
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They allowed a dispersed public to follow the progress of these long drawn-out military engagements in some detail.

The Fugger news archive was a private resource, created as an adjunct to one of Europe's greatest business empires. But it was not long before the enormous opportunities of news gathering stimulated the growth of commercial news agencies in imitation of the Venetian
novellanti
. The Fuggers may well have employed one of the first independent entrepreneurs in Augsburg, Jeremias Crasser, to prepare digests of incoming despatches. But it was another Augsburg man, Albrecht Reiffenstein, who made this extraordinary proposition to Duke August of Saxony in 1579:

This suggests an extraordinarily developed network of commercial news men. Certainly within a few years news writers were prospering in Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Prague, Vienna and Leipzig. Duke August, incidentally, accepted Reiffenstein's proposition by return of post. Four years later he had contracted another man, Philip Bray, to provide news from France and the Low Countries. Bray was to be paid the enormous sum of 100 florins every quarter. His newsletter would be sent by courier to August by way of Nuremberg and Dresden.

These transactions demonstrate the astounding value that the political and business leaders of Germany placed on reliable news. In difficult times – and these were particularly troubled years – it was necessary for those in positions of authority to have access to the swiftest and most accurate information. The local Fugger agents played a role that was similar to that of the ambassadors serving Europe's crowned heads, gathering up, listening, sifting and passing on their best judgement of what was to be believed. But they also passed on as many of the different news reports as they could gather together. An important regional ruler like August of Saxony wanted both the reports of his own agents and those of the commercial news men.

The commercial manuscript newsletter proved remarkably enduring. The news writers survived the hostility of sixteenth-century popes and the arrival of the first printed newspapers. In the seventeenth century the manuscript news services even moved into new territories, with the establishment of the first news agencies in London.
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Through all the pamphlet storms and technological change of the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries the newsletters lived on with the same orderly progression of neat paragraphs: ‘It is reported from Vienna’, ‘News from Granada’, ‘It is said on the Bourse’. Well-sourced, dispassionate and reassuringly expensive, the manuscript newsletters were a distinctive and now almost wholly forgotten part of the news world. For two centuries Europe's opinion-formers would not be without them.

CHAPTER 6

Marketplace and Tavern

T
HE
manuscript news agencies were the tools of the privileged. The expense of commercial manuscript news was in this sense no disadvantage: rather, expense offered the reassurance of authority that men of power looked for in a well-informed source. Those without access to these services could still learn much from printed news pamphlets, a more promiscuous and boisterous medium, and one that now played an increasingly confident role in sharing news of current events with a wide reading public. But there was a third strand to early modern news culture that should not be ignored: news passed by word of mouth.

The full potency of this verbal news culture was first demonstrated in England in the years after the Reformation. In the 1530s the introduction of the new worship service and dissolution of the monasteries caused widespread unease and some outright opposition. The task of seeing that this did not get out of hand fell to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's loyal minister and the primary architect of the new Protestant regime. Cromwell was nothing if not thorough. In these difficult and troubled years the Chief Secretary and his agents embarked on a sustained campaign to winkle out dissent and to punish the guilty.
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Many of those caught in his net were barely literate and not very articulate. But they had strong views to express. Denis Jones, a smith from London, was one who passed on the news he had gleaned in the capital when he stopped by the Bear Inn in Reading. Some time before he had been drinking with a group of neighbours from the Isle of Wight when a pedlar came in and told them ‘that he heard at London that Queen Anne was put to death and boiled in lead’. Others gave garbled accounts of royal legislation and shared rumours of the king's death. When in March 1535 Adam Fermour of Walden in Essex returned home after a trip to the capital, he faced the inevitable question, ‘What news?’ His neighbours had no trouble remembering his chilling
reply. ‘By God's blood, evil news! For the king will make such laws that if a man die his wife and children shall go a-begging.’
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This was politically dangerous indeed, and it is no wonder that the government took such strong action. But what comes through most forcibly in these reports is the ubiquity of travellers as vectors of information, and inns as places where it was heard and reported. Even in a country like England, where printing was entirely confined to the capital, news could travel fast, if not always accurately.

Pre-industrial society was still to a very large extent an oral culture. It was not just that many men and women could not read, though this was certainly true. Rather the whole process of social organisation and decision-making was organised around an inherited tradition of communal activity, verbal expression and face-to-face contact. Governments across Europe could make war, pass laws and raise taxes, as they did with increasing confidence and frequency. But these decisions still had to be explained to an active and interested citizenry. A wide measure of public consent had to be obtained, because laws could not otherwise easily be enforced. States lacked the power for sustained coercion of their own citizens: there were no standing armies and only the most rudimentary police forces.

Even in less urgent times early modern societies were characterised by an insatiable curiosity: news of neighbours, friends, the mighty, great events and catastrophes, all added spice to the humdrum and leavened the hard realities of everyday existence. The principal locations for this social interaction were the marketplace and the tavern. These were the universal gathering places of early modern society. They brought together travellers and residents, the literate and illiterate, members of different social classes, and, to an extent, men and women. These were the kingdoms of the spoken word of news.

To Market

The marketplace was the central site of information exchange across European society. In the routine of everyday life, long-distance travel and trade were unusual. Most of the essentials of life could be obtained locally: in the village, or from the local market. Since medieval times market towns had developed as a natural network about 30 miles apart. Most villages would be not more than 15 miles from a market town: a stiff day's journey there and back for a mounted rider or a farmer with his oxen and cart.
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This normative sense of a day's journey was, as we have seen, strongly influential in the construction of the European road system, with its network of inns and lodging, and the postal system.