These complications added new and testing responsibilities to the envoy's tasks. The urgent search for information required increasing recourse to clandestine contacts and espionage. In the age of confessional conflict disaffected subjects prepared to share their schemes with foreign agents were not difficult to find. But these connections did not always lead an ambassador towards sober or dispassionate judgements. It was dangerous to be swayed by easy if somewhat desperate accounts of the strength of opposition, and passionate if treasonable offers of assistance. Sixteenth-century governments had many opportunities to experience the undoubted truth that there is nothing so poisonous to intelligence gathering as the wishful thinking of the disenchanted and dispossessed. Captured Spaniards from the Armada fleet in 1588 revealed that they had been led to expect that between a third and one half of the English population was ready to support the invasion.20 This was a total fantasy: Spanish ambassadors proved all too credulous in their dealings with English Catholics, and Protestant English policymakers made the same mistake with French Huguenot émigrés. English ambassadors in Spain faced a frosty reception, but at least there were no Spanish Protestants to lead them astray.
In these highly charged times the stakes were high, and it became increasingly difficult to assess the quality of information received. It is always possible in retrospect to isolate nuggets of truth in a blizzard of contradictory intelligence reports, and marvel that they were not acted upon. At the time it is never so obvious. The English government already possessed by 1586 an exact logistical plan of the proposed Spanish invasion of England. But even as the Armada prepared to set sail two years later, in late May 1588, they continued to doubt its intended destination. Admittedly they were not helped by confident predictions conveyed by the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, that the Spanish fleet was to be directed to Algiers, or the Indies (this he reported as late as June). The English government were not to know that this supremely well-placed source was in the pay of Spain, and deliberately sowing disinformation.21
Even if an agent received valuable information, it could be extremely difficult to convey it back home. Their hosts knew full well who the ambassadors had been meeting and wanted to know what they had written. Diplomatic despatches became a legitimate target. Cardinal Wolsey would intercept diplomatic correspondence on the most spurious of pretexts, as did Cardinal Gattinara on behalf of Charles V. Later ministers contrived sophisticated ways of reading outgoing despatches and then resealing them undetected. To secure the safe passage of their reports, ambassadors increasingly made use of ciphers.22 On the whole these were not very effective ways of protecting despatches. Most embassies used simple systems of substituting a numeral or arbitrary symbol for each letter or short word: anything more complex proved too cumbersome or resulted in messages becoming hopelessly scrambled. Ambassadors tended to undermine the system by using the same cipher for years on end, such as Chapuys for instance during his entire embassy (1529–45). Although the Spanish Embassy in Prague had several ciphers at its disposal, the ambassador used the same one for the whole period between 1581 and 1608. Europe's major capitals all possessed the key.
Almost all ambassadors maintained a network of spies and informers. Some were valuable sources; others deluded fantasists or light-fingered opportunists who deftly played off one intelligence service against another.23 The best form of intelligence was often obtained by a simple cash transaction with a relatively junior member of the burgeoning state bureaucracies. For a fee a clerk or secretary could often make copies of incoming letters. Several of the letters included with the Urbino collection of newsletters were obtained in this way.24 Given the casual nature of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century record-keeping, this was neither difficult nor dangerous. The English agent in Venice had a budget of £40 for bribes which he mostly employed to buy copies of letters directed to rival diplomats. Even in Spain, the postmaster's office proved susceptible to English gold. A report to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, in 1598 included the remarkably matter-of-fact observation from his Spanish agent:
Postmasters in Spain weigh out the letters to their servants, and are easily corrupted for 28 ducats a month: the one at Madrid, Pedro Martinez, let me have all of Cressold's and Englefield's letters, returning such as I did not care to keep.25
The burgeoning commercial news services of these years would also make increasing use of paid contacts among the low-paid clerks and officials who necessarily had sight of sensitive material.
No amount of sophisticated intelligence was of much use, however, if the information was poor. The embittered confessional politics of the second half of the sixteenth century represented a difficult time for Renaissance diplomacy. The permanent state of enmity that engulfed Europe's leading powers made the maintenance of traditional diplomatic relations virtually impossible. Ambassadors were frequently being withdrawn or expelled. Nothing better symbolises this deterioration than the colourful career of Bernardino de Mendoza, one-time Spanish ambassador to England. Expelled by Queen Elizabeth in 1584 for his shameless orchestration of a plot to have her assassinated, Mendoza was then sent to France with the explicit task of organising the opposition of the Catholic League to King Henry III. After the French king's assassination in 1589, Mendoza ended his diplomatic career, sword in hand, leading the resistance of the French capital to their new king, Henry of Navarre.26
Strange times indeed for the craft of diplomacy. It was clear that men of this temper could no longer provide the dispassionate advice necessary for decision-making. A different source of informed confidential advice was required. In the sixteenth century this emerged in the form of a new commercial manuscript news service: the avvisi.
The First News Agencies
In the years around 1590 the Italian city of Lucca was looking to find a new source of confidential information in Rome.27 A correspondent there recommended that they employ Giovanni Poli: he was said to be far and away the best, and that there was not a single Italian ruler who did not have him under contract. Poli was also a careful man, both savvy and discreet. He knew that the reputation of his business depended not only on the quality of his product, but also on the cultivation of a certain mystique. So he developed a particular way of conducting business. He would rise early in the morning to write his reports. Then he would carry them personally across the city to deliver them to the post. This way he would ensure that they could not be tampered with en route; and Rome would see a master craftsman going about his business.
Poli was a novellante, one of a new breed of news-gathering scribes who offered a commercial news service to subscribing customers. The clients were invariably rich and powerful men from the governing or commercial classes, for the service was not cheap. (Lucca, incidentally, accepted the recommendation to engage Poli, and remained a subscriber to his newsletter for almost thirty years.) To succeed, novellanti had to earn a reputation for the quality of their information and the range of their sources. This was certainly the case with Poli: the despatches from the Spanish ambassador in Rome were said to be nothing much more than Poli's reports rendered into Spanish. Poli was at the top of his trade, which was why his weekly perambulation through the busy streets of Rome became part of the folklore of this remarkable city.
Poli represented a new twist in the development of an ever more diverse sixteenth-century news market.28 The craft of the novellanti was incubated in the twin cities of Rome and Venice, the European centres of commercial news and political gossip. The roots of the new medium can be traced back to the commercial correspondence of medieval times. A fascinating despatch survives from the year 1303, sent by members of the Ricciardi company of Lucca to their representatives in London.29 The letter offers a long digest of news from Lucca and the Italian Peninsula, along with news from France. For the wealth of incidental detail this can be compared with the despatch prepared, a century later, by Antonio Morosini for his nephew serving as the Venetian consul in Alexandria.30 These digests of political informa
tion, rare for their detail, are a reminder that it was as important to keep far-flung agents abreast of events at home as it was for them to send back intelligence from their postings.
In these despatches political news was generally mixed with instructions and information about essential commercial transactions. The emergence of the manuscript newsletter as a separate entity took a step forward through the initiatives of two well-connected Italians, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti and Benedetto Dei. The two men, who developed a close friendship towards the end of Dei's life, had arrived at their vocation as purveyors of news through rather different routes. For Arienti, his interest in news was almost an accidental by-product of the conventional search for patronage through literary endeavour. In the course of this literary life he moved into the circle of Ercole d'Este, Duke of Ferrara; Arienti would later be a valued correspondent of Ercole's daughter, Isabella, after her marriage to Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua.31 Both appreciated his regular and extensive compilations of news. Based in Bologna, Arienti was well placed to cull news from travellers on the road to Florence and Rome. He also maintained an extensive web of correspondents. One of these was the indefatigable Benedetto Dei. Dei's activities as a news correspondent were the culmination of an eventful life that had taken him to France, England and Germany, and had involved extensive travels in Asia and Africa. He returned to Florence in 1468 after several years’ residence in Constantinople. Clubbable and gregarious, Dei used the web of connections developed during these years to build an unrivalled reputation as a source of news. Between 1470 and 1480 he adopted the practice of issuing regular bulletins which, for the first time, deviated from the customary epistolary style to create a new form of writing. One surviving letter, from 1478, offers fifty short items. Each is a single sentence with a dateline indicating the source of the report:
I have news from Genoa that the Doge has knighted Batistino and sent away the [families of] Adorni and Raonesi.
I have news from Lyon, the trade fair has been very very good; a lot of textiles have been sold and a good deal of money gained too.
I have news from France that nine ambassadors are coming to Italy with 200 horse to make peace for everyone.32
Dei's correspondence with Arienti offers numerous examples of how his news was gathered. Arienti frequently forwarded mail to Dei from Bologna, re-directing it to the Medici bank in Florence where Dei received correspondence. Much of Dei's detailed information from France came from Medici contacts, particularly Francesco Sassetti of the Medici bank in Lyon.33 Spanish news came from merchants resident in Florence. Dei traded particularly on his unrivalled contacts in the Ottoman Empire and at the court of the Sultan of Egypt; he boasted of his ability to send regularly every Saturday ‘the news from Asia and from Africa and from Europe always’. This was a very significant remark, for it indicates that Dei was the first to conceive of his news bulletins as a weekly service. Whereas Arienti, in the medieval and Renaissance fashion, hoped to curry princely favour through his news digests, Dei expected and received regular payments for his bulletins. In the last years of his life Dei held a unique position at the centre of a web of news gathering. A letter from an admiring correspondent in Cortona in 1490 assured him that his letters were eagerly awaited: as soon as they arrived they were immediately copied many times over.34
It is clear from this that Dei had not yet developed the most effective commercial model. To maximise income the news correspondent had to supervise personally the processes of replication and distribution. In the next few decades the avviso gradually developed into its mature form. The avvisi of the sixteenth century generally consisted of one or two sheets of paper folded once, to make the equivalent of a quarto pamphlet of four or eight pages. These were filled with a sequence of reports, each consisting of a short paragraph of two or three sentences. They began in the style that Dei had pioneered with a dateline: ‘News from Venice, 24 March 1570'; ‘In a letter from Constantinople it is reported’. The paragraph then summarised the news reported from that place. So under ‘news from Rome’ would be listed all the news emanating from Roman sources, even if it related to places far away. It would be followed by news gathered from Venice, France, Constantinople, from the Low Countries and England. This style of presentation was maintained largely unchanged in manuscript news services into the eighteenth century; it also proved deeply influential in shaping the first printed news serials. The newspapers of the early seventeenth century would in this respect owe far more to the conventions and news values of the avvisi than to the very different style of the printed news pamphlets.
The places from which news was gathered were a largely unvarying list of key news hubs: in the case of transalpine locations, generally major commercial centres well served by the continental postal services. The tradition was that the news should be transmitted in crisp sentences with little by way of commentary or analysis. The emphasis was on providing the maximum information; the merchants and members of the governing classes who were the major clients of the novellanti could draw their own conclusions. Thus the avvisi were very different from diplomatic despatches, where the information supplied would be shaped by the known political priorities of the ambassador's home state. The avvisi, in contrast, affected an air of studied neutrality. Although this could sometimes be deceiving, it did permit commercial newsmen to develop a wide circle of clients among the leaders of Italy's often feuding states. The avvisi were neither tailored to nor adapted for individual clients. In the newsletters supplied to the Duke of Urbino from Rome after 1565 he would regularly receive news of his own activities – at least as they were reported in the eternal city.35
A further unvarying convention was that the newsletters were unsigned. This may seem rather odd to us, since the novellanti certainly wished to advertise their skills and broaden the circle of their clients. The best, like Poli and the Venetians Hieronimo Acconzaicco and Pompeo Roma, became well-known figures. The tradition of anonymity has more to do with a conscious attempt to differentiate between fact, as reported, and opinion. Unverified reports were clearly indicated as such: ‘it is said …’; ‘it is reported from Lyon’.
The two major drivers in the development of commercial news agencies were Rome and Venice. It is not difficult to see why these cities were so influential. Venice was the commercial metropolis of the region, with the most highly developed diplomatic networks, territories and trade in the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. Since Venice was also a nodal point in European postal and diplomatic communications, the well informed could rely on hearing news from Paris, Lyon, Brussels and Spain, as well as from the imperial capitals of Vienna and Innsbruck. The Rialto was Europe's premier hub of commercial information exchange and gossip. When Salanio initiated a conversation in The Merchant of Venice with the greeting, ‘Now, what news on the Rialto?’, Shakespeare could expect a knowing chuckle from London playgoers.36
Rome for its part was the critical centre of political and ecclesiastical power. The need for papal approval of benefices made Rome a constant place of intrigue and the destination of numerous diplomatic missions. The continual inflow of Church revenues also made it a major centre of banking: a survey of 1550 enumerated fifty-one banking firms active in the city.37 In the second half of the sixteenth century an activist papacy, energetically promoting war against the Turk and Protestant heretics, commanded the attention of all Europe.
The different character of the two cities was reflected in a palpably different tone of the news reports circulated by their respective novellanti. In Rome the avvisi tended to be more gossipy, offering detailed reports of the manoeuvres of the Curia and ambitious cardinals. The most sophisticated news writers even attempted to develop a two-tier news service, distinguishing an ordinary bulletin from a premium service of confidential news for favoured clients. This was all well and good so long as the two did not get confused, as was the case with one Roman news writer whose secret sheet critical of the papal household was soon in the hands of the
Pope. The odd mishap apart, the Roman novellanti were happy to cultivate a reputation for being able to penetrate the most secret counsels of this city of schemes. A newly appointed aide to the court of one cardinal was strictly enjoined to have no contact with the news writers. They could, he was warned, ‘take the egg out of a chicken's body, let along the secret out of a youth's mouth’.38
As can be seen from these two examples, although Italian news writers provided what was increasingly regarded as an indispensable service, they were not universally well regarded. In the second half of the sixteenth century successive popes took strong action to set limits to their activities. In 1570 Pius V announced that he would energetically pursue the authors of defamatory broadsheets. Soon after this the writer Niccolò Franco was arrested, tried and executed. In 1572 an edict was promulgated against avvisi:
Let nobody dare or presume to compose, dictate, write, copy, keep or transmit to anyone libellous writings or letters of advice, called in the vernacular ‘lettere di avisi’, containing abuse, insults or personal attacks on anyone's reputation and honour, or any writing that discusses future events.39
The prohibitions were renewed by an edict of Sixtus V in 1586, and these years saw sporadic efforts to see them enforced. In 1581 one writer was given a life sentence for allegedly spreading rumours of the Pope's health. In 1587 a man described as the ‘head of a sect of gazetteers’ was executed for leaking confidential information. The actions against the news writers seem to have been particularly severe in Rome because their activities became conflated in the popes’ minds with the scurrilous writings of those who posted around the city the libellous satirical verses known as pasquinades. These were unrestrained and wilfully defamatory hits at those in power. Because they were posted up anonymously (many on the ancient statue nicknamed ‘Pasquino’, from which the name is derived), their authors were seldom discovered.40 The authors of the news-sheets, many of whom ran a large scribal office employing numerous clerks, were easier targets.
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself Page 14
