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

by Andrew Pettegree

  The news pamphlets proved immensely popular, both with the buying public and with publishers. Printers could make good money for a very limited outlay. Pamphlets of this sort offered far quicker returns than more substantial books, especially as most of the copies printed could usually be disseminated locally. One can easily see why publishers were so eager to feed an appetite for news whetted by the vast increase in the volume of cheap print during the Reformation. We will never really know how many of these news pamphlets appeared on the market in the course of the sixteenth century. These little works were intended to be read, passed around and then discarded. Many titles have no doubt disappeared altogether, so it is quite remarkable that some four thousand of these German news-books have survived. This represents a substantial proportion of the total output of German books during the sixteenth century.40

  3.3 The Neue Zeitung. This is one of many examples that bring news of the war with the Ottoman Empire.

  The news market, as one might expect, was strongest in the great commercial cities. Nuremberg, Augsburg, Strasbourg and Cologne were all established news hubs; but the predominance of these places was not absolute. The production of news pamphlets was remarkably dispersed, both around Germany and among the competing print shops of the major cities. It would be wrong to think that because pamphlets were cheap to produce, they were left to the smaller printing houses. Wealthier publishers were also keen to have a slice of this lucrative market, and in securing the latest texts they had a significant advantage. Many early news-books were based on letters or despatches addressed to the city magistrates. The city councillors were happy to see these reports placed in the hands of figures from the local printing establishment, who could be relied upon to publish sober, dispassionate and accurate versions, less likely to stir alarm and public agitation.

  The overwhelming proportion of the Neue Zeitungen deal with high politics: usually, foreign affairs. The first surviving Neue Zeitung, of 1509, is a report of the Italian wars; the second, from 1510, reports the reconciliation of the French king and the Pope.41 Over the century as a whole a large proportion of the news pamphlets published in Germany were devoted to chronicling the engagements and campaigns of the conflict with the Turks, on land and at sea.42 The land war, in particular, was very close to home for the German city states; at various times the seemingly inexorable progress of Turkish arms threatened to envelop the eastern Habsburg kingdoms, markets in which the German merchants had important investments. Pamphlets that kept readers in touch with these events found an eager, if anxious audience.

  This was by no means the whole of the news agenda. Printers also seized opportunities to share news of floods, earthquakes and destructive fires, celestial apparitions and notorious crimes. But these sorts of news events were not particularly common in the pamphlet literature. They found a more natural home in the ballad sheets and illustrated broadsheets that also play an increasing role in the news market of this period.43 These were the genres of news sensations: in contrast the Neue Zeitungen were generally rather sober and restrained in tone. The title-pages took pains to emphasise that these reports came from authentic sources. Very often the title-pages declared that their text was ‘received from a trustworthy person’ or reproduced a letter sent from abroad ‘to a good friend in Germany’.44 Sometimes they reproduced verbatim a despatch written by a captain from the camp or scene of battle.45 In this way the news pamphlets invoked the trust that reposed in correspondence as a confidential medium between two persons of repute, to bolster the credentials of publications that were now commercial and generally available. In keeping with these principles the news pamphlets are also generally careful to avoid any sensationalism. The titles are far more likely to emphasise that the despatch was ‘reliable’ or ‘trustworthy’ than shocking or astonishing. That sort of reporting was left to other parts of this increasingly sophisticated and diverse news market.

  The market for news pamphlets was not confined to Germany. The Low Countries were another important news hub; a significant number of news pamphlets were also published in England, many of them, particularly in the last decades of the sixteenth century, verbatim translations of news from France or the Low Countries.46 But news pamphlets were very much a phenomenon of northern Europe. It required really major events, such as the victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, to stir Italian publishers to a significant output of news pamphlets; the Italian Peninsula, to this point the hub of the European news market, was in this respect beginning to diverge from the north European norm. The German pamphlets were unique in their success in establishing such clear brand identity. No other print tradition developed anything to match the Neue Zeitungen. These were the first publications in the new era of print to acknowledge on their title-pages that the bringing of news of current events was their primary purpose. They shared this news, often of faraway places and events, with a broad and expanding public – and at a modest price. They made possible the wide circulation of information that had previously only been available to a privileged few opinion-formers. In this respect alone the emergence of this new print genre represents an important moment in the development of a commercial market for news.

  CHAPTER 4

  State and Nation

  THE rulers of medieval Europe devoted much time and effort to making their wishes known to their subjects and fellow citizens. As we have seen, this became an important part of the information culture of the age. Decrees and ordinances were made known by public reading; trusted lieutenants were informed by letter. With the invention of printing much thought was naturally given to how the new technology could be applied to simplify this task. In the compact city states of Italy, such a use of print may have seemed superfluous. Most citizens could be made aware of changes in law or regulation by proclamations in the marketplace or citizen gatherings. The larger nation states faced a different problem. Here it was likely that different instructions would have to be drafted for the governors and sheriffs of the disparate provinces. It was the restless mind of Maximilian I that helped inspire the first sustained experiments in the use of print for official purposes. The year 1486 witnessed the publication of several texts celebrating Maximilian's election as King of the Romans (confirming that he would succeed his father Frederick III as Emperor). Printers in seven different German cities took part in the publicity campaign.1

  The press could serve the prince, but it could also bite. Maximilian received an object lesson in these dangers when, two years later, his attempt to impose his authority on his truculent subjects in the Netherlands ended in disaster. On 31 January 1488 he was stopped at the gates as he attempted to leave Bruges, and hustled away to the castle. There Maximilian was held until, under duress, he had conceded to the demands of the rebels. The humiliating treaty was promptly published in Ghent; only then was he released. Several gleeful accounts of his discomfiture were circulated in Germany.2 The bruised but ever resilient Maximilian determined to make the printing press his own instrument. Over the next thirty years he made repeated use of print to publicise treaties, new legislation, meetings of the German Diet, instructions to officials and the raising of taxes. Under his father, all of this would have had to be done by handwritten circular letters. Maximilian achieved not only greater efficiency but far greater public awareness of the workings of government.

  This inaugurated a new era in the exploitation of print. In the course of the sixteenth century the state became one of the most important patrons of the publishing industry. Official publications of one sort or another became a staple of the industry. In many provincial cities the demands of local and national government for printed ordinances and regulations helped maintain a local printing press that would otherwise scarcely have been viable.

  The success of these experiments led to something altogether more ambitious. Could print be used, not only to inform, but to persuade? Could print become a powerful instrument for explaining policy and shaping public opinion? It was not long before Europe saw
the first sustained campaigns of state-sponsored polemic. This was a development of huge significance for the history of the news.

  Patriot Games

  We can see that the propaganda potential of print had not been lost on Maximilian. Having been humiliated at Bruges, he was keen that sympathetic printers elsewhere in his dominions would laud his policies as well as circulate his instructions. The publication of treaties was always an opportunity to advertise the virtues of peace, and praise the wisdom and magnanimity of the great. But for the most systematic exploitation of the press by the state to mobilise public support we should look not to Germany or Italy, the two largest and most developed news markets of the Renaissance era, but to France. At the end of the fifteenth century France was a powerful state emerging from 150 years of chronic warfare and political division. At times during the Hundred Years War the portion of French territory acknowledging the authority of the king had shrunk to a rump in central France; after the battle of Agincourt in 1415, even Paris had briefly been occupied by the English. The expulsion of the English in 1453 was a turning point; thereafter the French Crown consolidated its territories through the incorporation of important fiefdoms in the west and south. By 1490 France was an exceptionally coherent and potentially wealthy state of some 12 million inhabitants.

  To celebrate this new national awakening French kings were able to draw on some of the most gifted writers in Europe. The circle of poets and chroniclers who followed the court had already been put to good use in some precocious campaigns of political writing at the beginning of the fifteenth century.3 This established habit of literary advocacy could easily be adjusted to the age of print. And here the French possessed a priceless weapon, because in Paris they had at their disposal one of the greatest and most sophisticated centres of early print culture. In the fifteenth century this had been orientated mostly towards the publication of scholarly and Latin books. Now it would be used to engage the French public in the Crown's ambitious plans for territorial conquest.

  4.1 Print in the service of officialdom. In summoning a meeting of the German Estates, Maximilian gives a detailed account of recent events, including the battles of Verona and Vicenza.

  In seeking to exploit their new-found unity and strength, French eyes had turned inevitably to Italy. In 1494 the French claim to the kingdom of Naples led Charles VIII to embark on the first of a long series of military interventions that would, in the next sixty years, bring much tribulation to the Italian Peninsula, and ultimately little glory to France. From the beginning the military campaigns were accompanied by despatches home chronicling French progress and lauding their victories. A flurry of printed pamphlets shared news of the king's entry into Rome, his audience with the Pope, the conquest of Naples and Charles's coronation.4 These were all short pamphlets of four or eight pages, sometimes embellished with an eye-catching title-page woodcut. Most were the work of Parisian printers, though a number seem also to have been published in Lyon, a natural intermediary point for returning news on the road to the capital.

  The pamphlets of the Italian campaign were not absolutely the first of this genre to appear on the French market. In 1482 the treaty concluded between Louis XI (Charles VIII's father) and Maximilian had been published as a pamphlet.5 The printing of treaties became a staple of official publications, if necessary with some judicious editing of the more controversial clauses to ensure a favourable reception. This was certainly the case with the Treaty of Étaples, concluded between Charles VIII and Henry VII of England in 1492. Rapid shifts of royal policy needed careful and sympathetic handling, and the French Crown could call on a number of distinguished writers to make the case for peace, or war, as the occasion demanded. In 1488 Robert Gaguin called for peace with England in his ‘Passetemps d'oisiveté'; four years later Octavien de Saint-Gelais supported the renewal of war in a poem advising the foreign troops that they would be ‘better off back in Wales drinking your beer’.6

  Some of these effusions circulated in manuscript, others in print. Sometimes the propaganda effort overflowed onto the stage. We see some of the most imaginative use of regime-friendly propaganda during the reign of Louis XII, who in 1498 had rather unexpectedly inherited both the French throne and Charles VIII's claims in Italy. The outpouring of news pamphlets reached its high point with Louis's campaigns of 1507 and 1509, which brought about first the suppression of the rebellion of Genoa, then the humbling of Venice by the League of Cambrai.7 Louis's success provoked a counter-alliance determined to limit French power, led by the irascible warrior-pope Julius II. The bitter and very personal feud that now erupted between Louis and Julius was accompanied by a sustained campaign of personal denigration. A wave of political treatises and poetry engaged, among others, the talents of Jean Lemaire de Belges, Guillaume Crétin and Jean Bouchet. A printed placard carried a caricature of the Pope lying prone beside an empty throne and surrounded by corpses; a early example of political caricature. Pierre Gringore, the most talented of contemporary playwrights, staged a newly written sottie, Le jeu du prince des sotz et de mère Sotte (The Game of the Prince of Fools and his Idiot Mother). Full of cutting ridicule of Julius, this was performed at Les Halles, the main marketplace of Paris, on Mardi Gras in 1512.8

  If this was a treat for the citizens of the capital, it was printed pamphlets that ensured the widest possible circulation in the nation as a whole. In all we can enumerate at least four hundred news pamphlets published in French during the period of the Italian Wars (1494–1559).9 The truly innovative character of this literature can best be appreciated if we contrast this French use of print with the public reaction to the French assault in Italy itself. The French descent into Italy was a cataclysm for the Italian states. The sophisticated mechanism of communication developed to keep the rulers of the Italian states abreast of events helped generate an ever-shifting pattern of alliance and antagonism between the rival powers. It offered little protection against a ruthless external foe. As the most vulnerable Italian cities marshalled inadequate defences, others sought to pursue their hopes of territorial gain by allying with the invader. The result was chaos.

  The news networks of Renaissance Italy had been developed to serve the needs of a closed political and commercial elite. Now, in a time of crisis, the limitations of this culture were laid bare.10 The division between the rulers and an alert, articulate people was nowhere more obvious than in Florence. The great city of the Medici had shown little enthusiasm for the printing press. Now it paid the price as the thunderous prophecies of Savonarola captured a rapturous audience, first for his preaching, then for subsequent printed versions. Florence's under-appreciated printers, starved of patronage, were naturally delighted to find a new audience.11

  In Venice, Rome, Milan and elsewhere the writers of Italy turned away from demonstrations of polished humanist eloquence to an outpouring of vituperative political commentary. The poetry of the years of the French invasions is charged with a vivid savagery, as Italy's poets lamented the consequences of selfish and short-sighted political divisions, the hypocrisy of Church leaders, the vanity of princes, and the worthlessness of treaties and alliances. Little of this made its way into print; most was circulated in manuscript or posted anonymously in public places. From 1513, and the election of the Medici Pope, Leo X, this political poetry took on a pointedly personal tone. Leo and his successors, and indeed the entire college of cardinals, were denounced for a catalogue of vices.

  Seen in the round this literature of denunciation makes clear the hopelessness of Italy's predicament. The contrast between the optimistic, celebratory literature orchestrated by the French Crown and the utterly negative and destructive tone of the Italian pasquinades (satiric verses) is very striking. The political poetry of Rome, though witty and carried along by a torrential energy, was inward-looking and parochial. It may well have been that Cardinal Armellini had a mistress, but would Rome have been better defended, and the Church better governed, had he been chaste? The smallness of these concerns
and their mean-spirited nature made it difficult to see beyond this world of gossip, manoeuvres and tiny victories towards any real solution of Italy's predicament. This would be the fate that would await many satirists in the centuries that followed: the impotent glee of enraging the great, momentarily diverting, but ultimately changing nothing.

  The Fog of War

  The bitterness of these internecine conflicts in Italy and the conservative tradition of Italian letters made impossible the effective use of print such as we have seen in the case of France. The first to follow the French into the realms of political propaganda were not therefore the sophisticated Italians, but their Habsburg adversaries. With his election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, Charles V had fulfilled the elaborate dynastic plans of his grandfather Maximilian in the most spectacular way. France was encircled by a suffocating mass of Habsburg territories. The struggle for supremacy was fought in an exhausting sequence of campaigns and battles, a conflict that also had a profound echo in a coordinated effort to shape the news.

  The ebb and flow of pamphlet warfare mirrored closely the rhythms of the conflict. French campaigning in Italy produced a flurry of publications in 1516 and 1528–9. On the imperial side the interconnected events of 1527–9, with the coronation of Ferdinand I as King of Hungary closely followed by the renewal of the French War, produced a comparable outpouring of news prints in the Netherlands. Here Antwerp was in precisely these years emerging as Europe's northern news hub, and a major centre of print. More than thirty printers there helped chronicle the Emperor's determined efforts to humble France.12 Needless to say, both sides were keener to celebrate success than to acknowledge reverses. Charles V's loyal subjects would read of the king's great triumph at Tunis in 1535, but not of the catastrophe at Algiers six years later. It was the French who chose to publicise the scandal of the sack of Rome in 1527, laid waste by imperial troops under the French defector, the Duke of Bourbon. Netherlandish printers preferred to reserve comment until the Emperor's triumphant entry into Rome in 1536 provided them with a more palatable subject.