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

by Andrew Pettegree

  The First News Prints

  IN the new commercial world of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe, wealth brought many privileges. Men of power had long enjoyed the luxury of space: land on which to hunt; large and eye-catching villas on the main streets of Europe's richest cities. Now, thanks to international commerce, they were able to fill these houses with beautiful things. Their homes became the visible symbols of their wealth. They built gardens, wore fine clothes, and filled their rooms with exquisite objects: tapestries, sculpture, pictures and curiosities, the horn of a unicorn or precious stones. They also began to collect books. For the development of European intellectual culture the new vogue for books was highly significant. Until this point books were essentially a utilitarian tool of the professional writing classes. Books were accumulated only where they were used: in religious houses, by teachers in the new universities. Students might own one or two texts, often laboriously copied from dictation or from a rented master copy. It was only in the late fourteenth century that the building of a library became an important part of elite culture.

  Books and learning played a critical role in the new culture of the Renaissance. Scholars placed the rediscovery of lost classical texts at the heart of an exciting new world of intellectual exploration and literary fashion.1 Europe's major commercial hubs, in Italy, Germany and the Low Countries, became the centres of a new trade in the manufacture and decoration of books.

  As long as each book had to be hand-copied from another manuscript, the pace of growth was limited by the availability of trained scribes. Inventive spirits in different parts of Europe began experimenting with ways to speed the process by mechanisation. The honour of having first mastered the craft of printing would go to a German, Johannes Gutenberg, the manufacturer of pilgrims’ mirrors of a decade before.2 In 1454 Gutenberg was able to exhibit at the Frankfurt Fair trial pages of his masterpiece, a Bible, that he would go on to produce in 180 identical copies. Europe's book-owning classes were not slow to understand the importance of what Gutenberg had achieved. Attempts to protect the secret of the new technology were unavailing. Soon craftsmen were introducing the new technique of book manufacture to all corners of Europe.3

  The technological brilliance of print was indeed impressive, but the first generation of printers was remarkably conservative in the choice of books they brought to the market. The first printed books mirrored very closely the taste of established customers for manuscript books. Gutenberg's Bible was followed by psalters and liturgical texts. Italy's first printers published multiple editions of works by classical authors, the cornerstone of the humanist intellectual agenda. Standard legal texts of civil and canon law, medieval medical and scientific manuals, also became staples of the new market. These were on the whole big and expensive books. It took some time for printers to understand how this new invention might be used to exploit the market for news.

  For this reason the news events of the late fifteenth century did not, on the whole, leave a substantial impact on the new medium of print. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 came just before Gutenberg had successfully unveiled his new invention. For the next thirty years printers would be largely focused on mastering the new disciplines of a marketplace suddenly awash with unprecedented numbers of books, not all of which found customers. News of the conflicts in France, England and the Low Countries, and the darkening clouds gathering over the eastern Mediterranean, was spread by largely traditional means: in correspondence, and by travellers. The fall of Negroponte in 1470 and the siege of Rhodes in 1480 were the first contemporary political events to find a significant echo in print: the threat of Turkish encroachment, here as later, stimulated a pan-European response. Printed copies of the Pope's appeal for coordinated action for the defence of Rhodes were widely circulated.4 But these were ripples on the pond.

  For as long as the new industry remained geared to the production of large books for traditional customers, the reporting of contemporary events would remain a subsidiary concern. The expansion of print into new markets proceeded by tentative steps. First, printers would learn the value of varying their output by publishing small items for volume sales (cheap print). Then they would make experimental use of print to share news of the discoveries of faraway continents in the age of exploration. But it was only in the early sixteenth century, a full seventy years after Gutenberg published his Bible, that the world experienced its first major media event, the German Reformation.

  The Reformation catalysed a movement of powerful change that destroyed forever the unity of Western Christendom. It also alerted Europe's nascent printing industry to the potential of a whole new mass market for printed news of contemporary events. The news market would be changed for ever.

  The Commerce of Devotion

  In 1472 the first printers in Rome, Konrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz, appealed to the Pope for help. Their publishing house stood on the brink of failure. Their printing shop, according to their piteous petition, was ‘full of printed sheets, empty of necessities’.5 They had to this point manufactured an impressive 20,000 copies of their printed texts: but they could not sell them. Theirs was not an unusual experience for the first generation of publishing pioneers. The first printers were guided in their choice of texts by their most enthusiastic customers. The universities wanted texts; scholars wanted the classical works admired by humanists. The result was that many of the first printers produced editions of the same books. It turned out they had given too little thought to how they would dispose of the copies. The market in manuscripts was close and intimate: the scribe usually knew the customer for whom he copied a text. Now printers faced the problem of disposing of hundreds of copies of identical texts to unknown buyers scattered around Europe. The failure to resolve these unanticipated problems of distribution and liquidity caused severe financial dislocation. As a result a large proportion of the first printers went bankrupt.

  For the shrewdest among them, salvation lay in close cooperation with reliable institutional customers: the Church or State. In the last decades of the fifteenth century the rulers of a number of Europe's states began to experiment with the mechanisation of some of the routine procedures of government. The use of printing to publicise the decisions of officialdom would in due course become one of the most important aspects of the new information culture.6 But for the first generation of printers the Church would be the new industry's most significant customer. Alongside the numerous prayer books, psalters and sermon collections, church institutions also began to contract printers to mechanise the production of certificates of indulgence.

  One of the ironies of Luther's later criticism of indulgences was that they were not only hugely popular, but an early mainstay of the printing industry.7 After several centuries of evolution the theology of indulgences reached its mature form in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.8 In return for the performance of pious acts – participation in a pilgrimage, contribution to a Crusade or church building – the repentant Christian was offered the assurance of remission of sin. The practice was closely associated with the doctrine of purgatory, to the extent that the length of the remission, often forty days, was precisely quantified. The contribution was acknowledged with a receipt or certificate: initially on parchment or paper, and handwritten.

  It was swiftly recognised that the labour of inscribing such certificates would be greatly reduced if the terms and details of the gift could be printed, leaving gaps for insertion of the name of the recipient and the sum donated. Certificates of indulgence soon became a ubiquitous feature of publishing in Germany. For printers, this was the ideal commission. The work was short, a few simple lines of text, easily set up and executed. Since the complete text was a single sheet, on one side of paper, it demanded no technical sophistication. Most crucially, a printed indulgence posed the printer none of the complex problems of distribution that shipwrecked so many early businesses. With indulgences the printer undertook the work as a commission from a single client, normally t
he bishop or a local church. It would be for the institution to distribute the copies: the printer would receive his full payment on delivery of the work.

  The scale of this business was clearly immense. Of the 28,000 printed texts that have survived from the fifteenth century, the first age of print, around 2,500 were single-sheet items or broadsheets. Of these, a third were indulgences. Furthermore, indulgence certificates were printed in far larger editions than was normal. The earliest books were printed in editions of around 300, rising to 500 by the end of the fifteenth century. However, for indulgences we know of orders for 5,000, 20,000, even in one case for 200,000 copies.9 This was work so lucrative that printers would often interrupt or put aside other orders to fulfil these commissions, as frustrated authors frequently complained. Gutenberg was one of many printers who undertook work of this sort, alongside more ambitious projects.10

  This sort of ephemeral printing is particularly prone to the natural wastage that has caused so much early print to be lost. Some publications that have vanished altogether can only be documented from archival records. Taking all this into account, we can reliably estimate that by the end of the fifteenth century printers would have turned out as many as three to four million indulgence certificates. This was good work for printers, and they grabbed it like a lifeline.

  The indulgence campaigns also gave rise to a host of associated works. One of Gutenberg's early publications was the so-called Türkenkalendar, a six-leaf pamphlet entitled A Warning to Christendom against the Turks.11 Under the guise of a calendar for the year 1455, a series of verses exhort the Pope, Emperor and the German nation to arm for the fight against the common enemy. The following year Pope Calixtus III proclaimed a Bull exhorting the whole of Christendom to join the crusade, either in person or through monetary contributions. The German translation of this Bull was published as a fourteen-leaf pamphlet.12

  3.1 The trade in salvation. An indulgence published as part of Raymond Peraudi's third great German campaign, 1502.

  These pamphlets had an important news function. Campaigns that raised money for international causes, such as the incessant calls for crusade against the encroaching Ottoman Empire, brought news of these faraway events to a wide public.13 These publications, though generally originating in Italy, achieved a remarkable geographical range. The crusading writings of Cardinal Bessarion were among the first books published in France.14 William Cousin's account of the siege of Rhodes was the first book published in Scandinavia (in 1480). Two years later, an explanation of the plenary indulgence decreed for the Turkish crusade was the very first book published in the Swedish language.15

  The unchallenged superstar of this new financial evangelism was Cardinal Raymond Peraudi. An indefatigable preacher and pamphleteer, Peraudi led three major fund-raising campaigns in northern Europe between 1488 and 1503. His sermons were major events for the towns that received him, and the sums raised were divided between the Church and the local authorities according to a carefully laid-down formula. Peraudi's activities were supported in a blizzard of publications, in both broadsheet and pamphlet form.16 The careful orchestration of information, exhortation and excitement has much in common with modern campaigning techniques.17 Peraudi would arrive in a city with great pomp and circumstance. His visit was often preceded by publications announcing his impending arrival and the cause for which he preached. After he had roused the crowds to pious devotions, contributors would be provided with the indulgence certificate stipulating their donation and the promised remission. Those keen to learn more could buy locally printed copies of Peraudi's sermon.

  Peraudi could not be everywhere, so in other places the campaign was led by appointed deputies. In Sweden it was headed by the Dutchman Anthonius Mast, who brought with him 20,000 letters of indulgence, of which 6,000 were taken on to Finland by Michael Poyaudi.18 This was a carefully coordinated and highly sophisticated media campaign, designed to energise Christendom to a sense of shared responsibility for critical events in faraway lands. It was also a precocious demonstration of the potential impact of printing.

  These events were intensely moving for those who witnessed a great preacher at work; for the history of publishing they are also deeply significant. For many of Europe's citizens the precious certificate of indulgence would be the first printed text they owned. In contrast to the rather conservative instincts of many early publishers, these fund-raising campaigns increased awareness in the industry of the possibilities of the new medium. The publishing opportunities surrounding the preaching of indulgences alerted many publishers for the first time to the value of cheap print. It was an important dry-run for the media storm that would engulf Germany a generation later with the coming of the Reformation.

  New Worlds

  On 18 February 1493 a small weather-beaten ship, the Niña, made landfall on one of the Portuguese islands of the Azores. On board was the Genoese adventurer Christopher Columbus, who had just completed the first successful voyage back and forth across the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. The discovery of the Americas was one of the critical turning points in world history, and it took place just as Europe's public was beginning to explore the potential of printing as a news medium. In 1492, the same year that Columbus had set sail from Spain, a giant meteor fell near the Alsace village of Ensisheim. An enterprising poet, Sebastian Brant, had composed a verse description of the event. Several German publishers then printed this text, along with a bold woodcut representation of the meteor racing across the sky. This news broadsheet proved enormously popular, and several editions still survive.19

  The discovery of the Americas was potentially of a whole different order. In the long term, if hopes were realised of large discoveries of gold and spices, it could transform the European economy. In the shorter term it pitted against each other the two great monarchies competing for domination of the trans-oceanic lands, Portugal and Castile-Aragon. A few years later the Portuguese would triumphantly conclude their own momentous feat of exploration, linking the Eastern spice lands with the European market by rounding the southern tip of Africa.

  At the time, it must be said, this Portuguese expedition seemed to Europe's news markets the more significant story of the two. The true impact of Columbus's three great voyages emerged only gradually. Despite this, the response to Columbus offers a particularly interesting case study of a developing news event at a time when the news market was itself in a state of transition.

  Even before the forced landfall in the Azores, Columbus was acutely aware that accounts of his voyage would have to be carefully managed. He had departed garlanded with the most expansive promises of rewards should he find, as he had promised, a westward passage to the Asian spice markets. As Admiral of the Ocean Seas he and his heirs were to be invested with hereditary dominion and a tenth of the profits emanating from the new discovered lands. His ships had crossed the ocean but what they had discovered was by no means clear. Columbus could not definitely confirm a route to Asia, nor offer any clear prospect of riches: the novelties he could display, parrots and native captives, might seem an insufficient surrogate for the gold and spices he had promised.

  Even to make his report to Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus had first to endure a second unwanted brush with the Portuguese. After extricating his crew, with some difficulty, from the Azores, Columbus's ship was forced to take refuge in the harbour of Lisbon. He was summoned to a potentially difficult interview with the King of Portugal, a man who had previously turned down his offer of service, but would now have a very shrewd understanding of what his navigational feat might mean.

  Before he attended this awkward rendezvous, Columbus had taken the precaution of sending a report of his discoveries to his royal patrons at Barcelona. He despatched a second copy from the Spanish port of Palos, near Cadiz, after his patched-up ship had been allowed to sail on – to his enormous relief – from the Portuguese capital. Both reports made their way successfully to Barcelona, where they had in fact already been anticipated by
a messenger from Martin Pinzón, captain of the Pinta, which had been separated from the Admiral's ship in the storm that blew Columbus into the Azores. The Pinta made landfall in northern Spain, from where Pinzón sent word overland to the court, asking leave to come in person to tell the story of the voyage. This was refused: the sovereigns insisted this was the prerogative of Columbus. He was now summoned to Barcelona for what became a triumphant festival of celebration.

  In the weeks following Columbus's meeting with Ferdinand and Isabella, further manuscript copies of his report circulated around the court. It was not long before one appeared in print, in a Spanish translation published in Barcelona. A copy of the original letter was printed almost simultaneously in Valladolid, and it was this Latin Epistola de insulis nuper inventis ('Letter from the islands recently discovered') that became the basis for a rapid flurry of reprints: in Rome, and north of the Alps at Basel, Paris and Antwerp. A paraphrase of this letter was also rendered into Italian by Giuliano Dati, and it too found an eager public, with three editions published before the end of the year.20

  Columbus, for all his fantasies and delusions, was a remarkable man. He had charted, almost by instinct, what was to prove the most expeditious route for transatlantic sailing; he also proved a remarkably effective publicist. His account of this first voyage was a masterpiece of concise exposition, fitting neatly into an eight-page pamphlet. But the commercial success of De insulis inventis should not lead us to overestimate its influence in shaping contemporary perceptions of Columbus's discoveries. Even before the pamphlet was printed in Rome, sometime after 29 April 1493, news of the voyage had already made its way to at least seven different cities through manuscript reports.21 These manuscript letters, and the earliest verbal reports, seem to be what weighed most heavily among opinion-formers. Columbus stuck doggedly to the view, at least in public, that the lands he had discovered were Asiatic; he had therefore fulfilled the terms of his contract and deserved his reward. Others were more sceptical. Among those who had the chance to converse with Columbus at court were two men who would themselves be influential in promoting the oceanic discoveries in their publications, Pietro Martire d'Anghiera and the young Bartolomé de Las Casas. At his Lisbon landfall Columbus had also made the acquaintance of Bartholomeu Dias, a veteran of the first Portuguese voyages around the Cape. These men were aware that Columbus had done something remarkable, but doubted that he had found a route to Asia. The formal response of his royal patrons reflected this emerging consensus: their greeting referred more ambiguously to ‘Islands you have discovered in the Indies’.