The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

by Andrew Pettegree

  I have read a letter of my uncle Antonio, who gives you much news but also many lies, which were passed on to him. And so he writes you what he hears. But I advise you that you should not trust such gossip, which I am afraid, could cause him difficulties one day. So please, don't show or read in public [the parts of] these letters, which in your opinion should be kept discreet.30

  This is all the more galling as it seems to have been unfair: Morosini's letter does not include anything that was not reported elsewhere. The whole issue of when rumour became news was a thorny one. It was up to each man's judgement to know what to believe, and when to act.

  Much rested on the personal reputation of the individual making the report. The early medieval tradition that word of mouth was more to be trusted than a written report lingered on in some of the correspondence. ‘Put Domenico on horseback and send him quickly by land, giving me news of what you have done’ was the demand of one impatient merchant.31 But most often this was simply impractical. Datini lived in constant fear of double-dealing (perhaps because his own practices with his partners were none too scrupulous). Merchants were perfectly aware that managers and brokers in far-flung places would be trying to line their own pockets. When contracts were drawn up with agents abroad, clauses were routinely added forbidding them from playing games of chance, reflecting an awareness that heavy gambling losses could lead to desperate attempts to cover debts by embezzlement.32 These fears were perfectly understandable; but in the last resort trade could only function if merchants shared information. ‘When you write to me, always inform me in full,’ wrote an Italian trader in Damascus to an associate in Barcelona, ‘how the situation is at your place and what you think of it, and about the departing ships destined to this region, and what their cargoes are. And I will do the same for you.’ This man's philosophy might stand for the whole community: ‘in this way the one hand washes the other’.33 The business correspondence is full of plans and schemes, but also cautionary tales: ships lost at sea, goods stolen, a caravan loaded with precious cargo robbed by Arabs. Mediterranean piracy was an occupational hazard. Access to information could be the difference between prosperity and ruin. The development of Europe-wide enterprises was necessarily a matter of trust and reciprocity. In the last resort the Italians trusted their own trading apparatus, even if the human beings who formed its sinews sometimes fell short.

  Venice

  By the third decade of the fifteenth century, Venice had achieved a position of primacy among the Italian trading cities. It now played the pivotal role in three crucial areas of the international economy: the trade in cloth with London and Bruges, the trade in wool with Spain, and the exchange of cotton and spices with Egypt and the Levant. While much of the trade with northern Europe went via the circuitous sea route through the Mediterranean, the overland route to Germany offered an alternative. By this time merchants from the southern German cities were themselves active traders in the Venetian market. The system of government in the Republic was entirely orientated towards the protection of trade. The Senate would take charge of the composition and itinerary of the galley fleets that brought goods from the east and transported them on to Spain and London. It also intervened actively to prevent the creation of monopolies, thus protecting the livelihoods of the independent traders who were the lifeblood of Venetian commerce.

  The Republic's growing economic power did not go uncontested. At the beginning of the 1430s Venice prevailed in a trial of strength with the Sultan of Egypt, defeating his attempts to establish a monopoly over the spice and cotton trade. War with the Duke of Milan meant that for several years Venetian sailors risked capture by the powerful Genoese fleet. Meanwhile, the emperor Sigismund, a bitter foe of the Republic, attempted, largely without success, to enforce an embargo on Venetian goods in Germany. All of this meant that the Republic's trade was particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of enemy action. Merchants had to follow every twist and turn in the conflicts if they were to avoid ruinous losses.

  The instability of the times created opportunity as well as danger. Those who were prepared to take risks could maximise profit while the more cautious kept their ships in harbour. When peace was declared, previously idle capital flooded the market. In 1429 the price of pepper fell two points on rumours that the Sultan of Egypt had been deposed. War raised the price of pepper but depressed the price of cloth, making it more difficult to ship to the east; peace had the opposite effects.

  A peculiarity of Venetian trade was that whereas bulk goods to northern Europe were transported in the galley fleets by sea, mail was despatched overland. This provided the opportunity for the agile merchant to influence the market while the goods were in transit. The following advice from Andrea Barbarigo is perhaps not untypical:

  You asked about pepper and I reply as follows. My opinion would be that you dispose of said pepper at the end of January or before, especially if you can sell at 13 d or more, although our Vittore thinks it should be worth 15 d. I advise you that it is believed that none will be sent to the west by the Catalans, and if the Florentines bring any it will be very late. Of the Genoese I have no knowledge. I do not think there will be much brought by the galleys [of Beirut and Alexandria] because the Soldan [Sultan] has sent to have it taken by his mercantile agent in Alexandria. When the fleet from that port does arrive, which will not be before February or some months later, I think pepper will be worth perhaps 45–50 ducats. All that I say above is to advise you of my opinion, but I wish you to sell my pepper according to your judgement, for cash, term, or barter, and I leave you freedom as to price, trusting you to do the best you can.34

  As this shows, much was left to the judgement of the agent. Venetian traders, rather than establishing branch offices, tended to undertake new arrangements from voyage to voyage. Agents who were settled in Valencia, Bruges or Acre worked on commission. In the mid-fifteenth century letters from Bruges reached Venice in about twenty-five days. From Valencia, in northern Spain, they took about a month.

  By the end of the fifteenth century both the speed of transit and the intensity of contacts had increased markedly. Venice was by this point the undisputed news hub of Europe. Correspondence and despatches arrived in the city in considerable numbers every day, and the most sensitive reports were relayed directly to the Senate. Here their arrival was meticulously noted by the young patrician Marin Sanudo, a long-serving member of the Venetian administration who aspired to be named the city's first official historian. In this he was to be disappointed, but the notes he accumulated in his diary provide the most precious evidence not only of the speed and volume of correspondence, but of its effect on the Venetian economy.35

  From Sanudo's diary entries we see how directly political news impacted the price of commodities traded on the Venetian market. Venice was heavily dependent on imported grain; it was also re-exported to Germany in large quantities. The major source of imports was Sicily. Thus a report in 1497 that the harvest there was poorer than expected raised prices immediately.36 The high-value trade in spices was particularly sensitive to changes in political fortunes in the Levant. In 1497 Sanudo noted reports from Alexandria of political turbulence in Egypt that made spice traders reluctant to sell, since they anticipated an interruption to supply that would force prices up. In this context the success of the Portuguese in opening up a new spice route to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1501 was pregnant with consequences. The prospect that this would spoil the market to Flanders initially depressed prices in Venice. But then came news that the Portuguese had cornered the market, and there was little in Alexandria left to sell. The price of pepper in Venice rose from 75 to 95 ducats in four days.37 When the Portuguese succeeded in repeating the ocean passage to India the following year, the significance of this feat was not lost on the European merchant community. The news was relayed to Venice from Lyon, Genoa and Bruges as well as from Lisbon. According to another contemporary diarist, the news of the Portuguese success caused greater consternation than any mi
litary defeat: ‘everyone was stupefied; and this news was considered by informed people to be the worst ever received by the Venetian republic other than losing its freedom.’38

  The money market and the market in marine insurance were even more volatile. The news that the Turkish corsair Kamali was at sea in 1501 and had taken a host of ships caused marine insurance rates to leap from 1.5 to 10 per cent.39 With fortunes to be won or lost, those with money were prepared to pay to be first with the news. Also in 1501 the proprietors of the Venetian galleys destined for Beirut chartered a swift vessel to go ahead and advise the Arab traders that a richly laden fleet was on its way. The captain was to receive 850 ducats if he accomplished this voyage in eighteen days, but would lose 50 ducats for each two days of delay.40 In the sixteenth century a sliding scale of this sort was built into the tariff for express courier services between Venice and Rome. A courier who managed the journey in under forty hours would be paid an impressive 40 ducats (equivalent to the annual salary of a minor administrative officer). If the message took four days to deliver, the fee was a quarter of this.41

  With so much at stake, it is little surprise that the practice developed of annotating the outer wrapper of a letter with the time of despatch and arrival at each staging post on the route. The first known instance of timing dockets was recorded in the courier service established by Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan in the middle of the fifteenth century. The letters would be entrusted to mounted riders, sometimes with further scribbled invocations to emphasise the importance of the task: Cito Cito Cito Cito volando dì et nocte senza perdere tempo ('Haste, haste, haste, haste, fly by day and night, losing no time') was the insistent message recorded on a docket of the Milan courier master Tommaso Brasca on 6 February 1495.42 Both this sort of annotation and the practice of recording staging times became standard in the imperial and national postal services of the sixteenth century.

  An express courier was only used for news of exceptional importance or commercial sensitivity. What is extraordinary about the meticulous notes assembled by Sanudo is what they reveal about the sheer intensity of the news traffic arriving in Venice. The Venetian ambassador in Rome wrote every day, and couriers were despatched to Venice twice or three times a week. Intelligence from Naples, Lyon and London was almost as frequent. Several thousand of these incoming despatches were some time ago subjected to a systematic analysis by the French historian Pierre Sardella. He studied letters despatched to Venice from around forty different cities, noting, with the help of Sanudo's diary, the time of their despatch and arrival. For each place Sardella then calculated the longest time each letter took to reach Venice, the average and the shortest journey: this allowed him to create for each partner city a ‘co--efficient of reliability’ for the post between these places and Venice. By far the most reliable service was that between Venice and Brussels: letters arrived in Venice almost without fail ten days after despatch; note also the dramatic fall in transit time compared to Barbarigo's correspondence sixty years before. The post with London was slightly more variable because of the Channel crossing: correspondence that relied on long sea journeys, for example between Venice and Alexandria, could be very erratic.43

  What Venice had discovered was that although the bulk of trade continued to be transported by sea, land communications were by far the more reliable. The hub of Europe's news networks was now the settled road and river routes linking the commercial cities of Germany, Italy and the Low Countries. This was a development of the utmost significance for the emergence of an international network of news.

  The Eyes and Ears of Germany

  Venice also enjoyed extremely efficient letter communications with the cities of southern Germany. However difficult it might be to haul bulky commerce over the Alpine passes, the post got through.

  German merchants had played an important role in the European trade network since the twelfth century. Cologne was the northern gathering point of trade between inland Germany, the Low Countries and Italy. Merchants from northern Hanseatic cities such as Hamburg and Lübeck were also heavily involved in long-distance sea-trading.44 The German merchants were the first formally incorporated national group in thirteenth-century Bruges. But it was the southern German cities that would emerge in the later Middle Ages as motors of the central European economy. Augsburg and Nuremberg were, by 1400, in the forefront of production of the luxury manufactures so much in demand in Europe's major markets: both cities specialised in the production of linen cloth and metalwork. Augsburg was the source of much of the best armour and a precocious centre of banking. Nuremberg, with its close connections to the mining regions of Saxony and Bohemia, specialised in ironwork and brass.

  In the sixteenth century Augsburg would emerge as the critical nodal point in the European communications system. One hundred years before, this role had been played by Nuremberg. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Nuremberg was the effective capital of the German Empire, a primacy recognised in the expectation that emperors would hold their first meeting of the German Estates, the Reichstag, in the city.45 Nuremberg had the largest territory of any imperial free city. Its merchants had interests all over Europe, with particular concentrations in Spain, Italy and the Low Countries. The practice of merchant families sending their young men to serve apprenticeships in branch offices abroad persisted into the sixteenth century, as can be seen from the large numbers of letters that still survive in the archives from homesick and often misbehaving youngsters to their harassed parents.46

  A cornerstone of Nuremberg's rise to greatness was its engagement in the financing of industrial ventures in the mines of Saxony. Nuremberg was Germany's gateway to the east, and the major firms had branch offices in Vienna, Prague and Krakow. The fact that its governing council was drawn from the wealthiest merchants ensured that the interests of business would always be well represented. A mirror of Nuremberg's economic power can be seen in the city's success in insisting that its merchants were exempted from tolls in many other German towns. Nuremberg's economic power was respected but also feared: the city fathers were fully aware that the interests of their city had to be defended against predators. That demanded, above all things, a steady flow of accurate information.

  Nuremberg's status as an information hub derived partly from its geographic situation, at the confluence of twelve major roads. Martin Luther described the city as ‘the eyes and ears of Germany’, and it would play a critical role in spreading news of his quarrels with the papacy.47 The role of the international merchant community as a source of information was widely recognised. In 1476 the minutes of the Town Council record a decision ‘to seek advice from the merchants’ and this would not have been unusual.48 The steady Turkish advance through the Balkans in the fifteenth century threatened many areas where Nuremberg merchants had invested capital. When war seemed likely, the city merchants would entrust one of their number who had interests in the area with finding out what was afoot. Critical information was frequently shared with other German cities. In 1456 news of the war with the Turks was despatched onward to Nördlingen and Rothenburg. In 1474 when the merchants contacted a friendly source in Cologne for information, they in return forwarded news from Bohemia, Hungary and Poland.49

  Map 2 Major European trade routes, c. 1500.

  To service this far-flung information system the German towns and cities maintained a sophisticated courier network. A regular courier service was in operation between Augsburg and Nuremberg by 1350, and the first surviving city accounts for Nuremberg, which date from 1377, show that the city was already making use of paid messengers.50 By the fifteenth century Nuremberg had a number of couriers on the city payroll. Notwithstanding the expense, the city made frequent use of their services: in the ten years between 1431 and 1440 Nuremberg sent out 438 messengers.51 This period of intense activity coincided with the latter stages of the Hussite wars, and in such turbulent times it was vital that the merchant community be aware of the latest developments in case their g
oods were impounded – either where they were traded or in transit. The city fathers regarded the outlay on messengers as money well spent.

  With these city courier services the south German cities had established a system that fell halfway between the traditional ad hoc system of merchant correspondence and the diplomatic networks beginning to be developed by Europe's leading princes. They were able to take advantage of the same synergy of interest we have observed in that other great merchant republic, Venice.

  In the sixteenth century the network of German city courier services would be linked up to provide a regular weekly service as an adjunct and later rival to the imperial post. Because the imperial post followed the major trade routes between the Netherlands and Italy, the north/south trade axis through the Empire was not well served, and this is where the city post came into its own. But this was for the future. At the close of the Middle Ages the merchant posts had established an intense and permanent node of communication between Venice and southern Germany, linking two of Europe's most sophisticated merchant economies. In turn this established a second vital stream of information to mirror the route through the western Alps linking Italy with Paris and Bruges. Venice and Nuremberg, the two great trading centres of the age, had established an undoubted primacy as information hubs south and north of the Alps. It was no accident that these cities would also be pioneers in the new information age that dawned following the invention of printing.

  CHAPTER 3