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

by Andrew Pettegree

  On the second of this month I dispatched a letter to Your Majesty on a frigate from Barcelona whose owner is named Bernardino Morel and I included the copy of the dispatches of the 8, 10, 17 and 21 July and in view of the good prevailing weather I trust that they will have arrived so long as no ship has cut them off.58

  This of course meant that Madrid frequently received several copies of the same despatch.

  Direct communication with Madrid was only one part of the vast official correspondence maintained by Philip's agents abroad. The instructions communicated to a new ambassador in Paris in 1580 required him in addition to maintain correspondence with the governors of Milan and Flanders, the viceroy of Naples and ambassadors in Rome, Venice and Germany. Communication with some of the most distant outposts was especially challenging. Post from the imperial court at Prague could take up to five months to arrive in Spain, and sometimes was lost altogether.59 Even an arterial route like the sea lanes between Naples and the Iberian Peninsula only operated for part of the year: between 15 November and 15 March the galley fleet was laid up because of the difficult and stormy conditions of the Mediterranean in winter. Post then had to be carried along the circuitous landward route via Genoa and Barcelona.

  Maintaining efficient contact with his network of ambassadors, agents and allies was for Philip both complex and expensive, even in the best of times. But these times were far from normal, thanks, not least, to the incessant warfare stimulated by his own policies. The quality of the postal network clearly deteriorated in the second half of the sixteenth century.60 Delays multiplied and the security of the post was frequently compromised. Most urgent was the interruption to the post caused by the wars in France. The arterial route between Barcelona and Italy passed through southern France to Lyon. By 1562 two of the crucial staging posts on this route, Montpellier and Nîmes, were in Huguenot hands, and couriers were frequently searched or robbed on the journey. On the northern route to Brussels the heavily wooded area around Poitiers was notorious for brigandage. In 1568 a Spanish royal courier was waylaid and murdered, and attempts to retrieve the diplomatic pouch were unsuccessful. It was soon recognised that the French transit routes were too hazardous. But avoiding France involved either a circuitous journey along the imperial post roads through the Empire, or using ships through the English Channel, where Spanish vessels faced increasing hazards from Calvinist privateers operating out of English ports or La Rochelle.

  In Brussels, the Duke of Parma faced particular problems in communicating with Philip II in time of war. On one occasion in 1590 he sent five copies of one despatch to ensure its arrival. Sometimes, it must be admitted, these logistical difficulties could be used to advantage. When Parma was asked in December 1585 to prepare an operational plan for the invasion of England, he took until April 1586 to reply. He then chose to send his report by the longest possible route, via Luxembourg and Italy, with the result that it arrived in Madrid on 20 July. This, as Parma was clearly aware, rendered a campaign that year impossible, and allowed him to keep his army intact for the war against the Dutch for another fighting season.61 The vagaries of the post also spared the Venetian ambassador in Madrid embarrassment during Armada year. As we have seen, on 17 August the Venetian Senate voted to offer Philip congratulations on his famous victory. Happily these instructions arrived in Madrid only on 2 October, by which time the scale of the catastrophe was becoming clear. The ambassador thought it best to ignore the despatch.

  The information network constructed by Philip was on paper impressive. But in practice the logistical difficulties under which it operated meant that a vastly increased volume of communication was combined with decreased efficiency: Philip was being drowned in stale news. These difficulties were compounded by the manner in which he chose to conduct business. Philip developed a style of government that deviated sharply from the accepted conduct of princes. At all points possible he avoided meetings. Papers were brought to him, and he considered them in private. This had a certain rationality: there were so many people wanting the king's ear, including the large residential diplomatic corps, that even to meet ambassadors on a regular basis would have been inordinately time consuming.62 Some accommodated themselves to the king's preferences. The French ambassador Fourquevaux, instructed to seek an audience, instead sent a letter. ‘I know that I would please him more if I communicated with him by letter,’ he explained to Charles IX, because ‘he prefers ambassadors to deal with him by letter rather than in person while he resides in his country houses.’63 Others, including the papal nuncio, who had been unable to secure an audience for four months, proved less understanding.

  Nothing could disguise that this was completely at variance with the normal traditions of court life, and many of King Philip's subjects expressed their disapproval. ‘God did not send your Majesty and all other kings to spend their time on earth so that they could hide themselves away reading and writing,’ wrote the king's almoner, with alarmingly frank courage. He went on to denounce ‘the manner of transacting business adopted by Your Majesty, being permanently seated at your papers in order to have a better reason to escape from people’.64

  Philip was not a recluse. He understood the value of showing himself to his people, and on such occasions the population responded with enthusiasm. He seems simply to have felt that the business of government could most effectively be conducted by reading. Theoretically his father Charles V had established a highly efficient system to sort and order the papers that flowed into the chancery. Councils were named to deal with the affairs of each province, and separately with war, finance and forestry. But Philip still insisted on taking all decisions himself. He rarely attended Council meetings, and was disinclined to join discussions between his advisors. High-ranking officials were not encouraged to return to Spain for debriefing between postings. Philip therefore chose to forgo important opportunities for detailed conversations with informed experts and advisors. He also completely discontinued the common practice of sending trusted messengers with oral instructions: all was set down in writing.

  The Council system did not succeed in establishing limits on the amount of paper that flowed across the king's desk. Philip would read anything that came his way, even from individuals who had bypassed the system to send him a paper: the original master plan for the Armada expedition came from one such unofficial source (the inquisitor and amateur strategist Bernardino de Escalante). It was not unusual for Philip to receive a thousand petitions a month. Some days he signed four hundred letters, all of which he read and often sent back for revision.

  For forty years Philip attempted, as one awestruck English observer put it, to govern the world with his pen and his purse. But was such a system possible in the communications environment of sixteenth-century Europe? Even if Philip responded to an urgent communication from the Viceroy of Naples on the day it arrived, this still involved a round trip of six weeks, if the system worked perfectly. Communication with the outlying territories of the Empire, in the Americas and Asia, took far longer. These difficulties were compounded by the time Philip took to arrive at decisions. Officials grumbled about the time they were kept in limbo, waiting for the king's commands. ‘If we have to wait for death,’ they quipped, ‘let us hope that it comes from Spain, for then it would never arrive.’65 Sometimes the delay was itself policy, as when Philip attempted to spin out a response to a developing crisis in the Netherlands until he had resolved the urgent conflict in the Mediterranean with the Turkish assault on Malta. But by failing to take his governor in the Netherlands, Margaret of Parma, into his confidence, Philip precipitated a new disaster. Despairing of a response, Margaret was forced to take the initiative and declare a limited suspension of religious persecution. When the king's instructions eventually arrived, ordering that persecution be maintained, the repudiation of previous concessions led to a far greater explosion of anger.66 Margaret was left humiliated and discredited, her authority effectively destroyed.

  The limitations of Philip's s
ystem were fully exposed when his attempts to resolve the complex politics of northern Europe from his desk in Spain collapsed in ruins. Three years of continual correspondence with the Duke of Parma in the Netherlands had failed to devise an invasion plan for England that could succeed. During this time Philip changed his mind constantly, at different times favouring a direct assault from the Low Countries and a landing in the Isle of Wight or Ireland. Even in August 1588 the bureaucrat king was attempting to guide the course of the battle (in fact already over) by insisting that his instructions were meticulously followed. The final act came when orders were drafted for Medina Sidonia to land in Scotland and ally with the local Catholics. But it was now mid-September, and the remnants of the invincible Armada were at this point approaching the Spanish coast. This was the fantasy of a defeated, exhausted man.

  PART TWO

  MERCURY RISING

  CHAPTER 8

  Speeding the Posts

  IT used to be said that the three centuries before 1800 saw no fundamental change in communication infrastructure, certainly nothing that could be described as a technological revolution. These were the times when sailors faced and overcame the challenge of ocean voyages, itself no mean feat and one based on small, incremental changes in the design of ships, sails and navigational instruments. Land transportation could register no equivalent landmarks. Europe's roads remained difficult and dangerous: there is some evidence that they may actually have deteriorated since the High Middle Ages. Travellers remained as before dependent on horses, carts and haulage for the movement of people and goods. Transportation by water, around Europe's waterways, depended as always on wind and tides, and the backbreaking work of oarsmen.

  Yet if much of the communication infrastructure of Europe was familiar and unchanging, the beginning of the seventeenth century did witness a step change so decisive as to amount, if not to a revolution, then certainly to a new beginning. This has escaped the view of most historians because it was an organisational shift, rather than a technological one. It was not like the introduction of gunpowder or printing: rather it required the application of bureaucratic intelligence to existing systems. Its impact was, however, as dramatic as many of those developments to which we attach the label ‘revolution’.

  The change in question was the wholesale transformation of the international postal service. In a few decades from the beginning of the seventeenth century, communication by post became quicker, cheaper and more frequent. The network of places linked by the post became dense and more intricate. For the provision of news this was a vital transformation. It made possible the frequent, rapid and reliable delivery of news necessary for the next crucial media innovation: the invention of the newspaper.

  The first newspaper was established in Strasbourg in 1605.1 It was the creation of a stationer who already had his own regular manuscript newsletter. The introduction of a weekly printed serial represented merely the mechanisation of an existing commercial process: the printed sheets, containing much the same news, gave Johann Carolus the opportunity to expand his client base for minimal extra cost. It was an experiment that carried little risk, and it seems to have been successful. Soon Carolus's Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien was being imitated in other German towns and in the Low Countries.

  The newspaper did not, however, meet with a universal welcome. Italy, the centre of the most intense network of commercial manuscript avvisi, did not take to the printed news-sheets. The world of news divided in two, between a north soon densely populated by a network of printed weekly news-sheets, and a south where they held no appeal. The centre of the European news network was to move north: much of the innovation of future centuries would be in the northern lands.

  This media transformation followed directly from the reorganisation of the postal services initiated at the beginning of the seventeenth century. These developments were not uncontested: many vested interests were bound up in the ad hoc systems that had served the provision of news, more or less adequately, over the previous hundred years. It required a great deal of determination, and some ruthlessness, to drive through the changes necessary to draw together the various systems into an integrated whole. This was the great achievement of the imperial postmasters, the family Taxis (or Tassis as they were known in Italy and Spain), who had now held these responsibilities for over one hundred years. Theirs is one of the great unsung achievements of European civilisation.

  At the Sign of Mercury

  The spine of the new postal network established in the seventeenth century was the imperial post created by the Emperor Maximilian one hundred years before. Intended originally to link his dominions in the Netherlands and Austria, the system was in due course expanded to take in the extensive new dominions encompassed by the inheritance of Charles V. His reign was the first golden age of the imperial post. Regular, reliable and freely available to those who could pay the tariffs, it became a mainstay of diplomatic and merchant communication. The Fugger family in Augsburg scored a significant coup when they negotiated privileged access to the postal system, an access later extended to a wide variety of paying clients; the family's carefully nurtured connection with the imperial postmasters was a cornerstone of their European trade network. The smooth functioning of the imperial system can be contrasted with the halting development of the post in two nation states outside the Habsburg orbit, France and England.2

  While Maximilian's initiative of 1490 had shown the way, the two crucial stages in the early development of the European postal network were the contracts with the Taxis family in 1505 and 1516.3 These agreements set the structure of the future imperial network in three critical ways: they established fixed contractual obligations for the delivery of post within a specified time; they extended the postal network to Italy and Spain; and they confirmed the position of the Taxis at the heart of the system. The treaty of 1505 granted the Taxis a fixed annual salary. The treaty of 1516, with the future Emperor Charles V, guaranteed that they would enjoy a monopoly on all postal transactions along the post roads. This, together with the right to take letters for private clients, made the Taxis rich.

  It also gave them the confidence to invest in further improvements to the system. The distance between postal stations was steadily reduced: from 38 kilometres under the original scheme to 30 kilometres in 1505. In the second half of the sixteenth century the intervals were reduced further, to three German Meilen or 22 kilometres.4 The treaty of 1516 established a new route from Antwerp via Innsbruck to Rome and Naples, linking these two great European trade centres (and news markets) to the imperial post. The contract envisaged that the new route would speed the post from Antwerp to Rome in 252 hours, or 10 1/2 days. It was astonishingly ambitious, yet all the signs, from surviving docketed letters, are that the timetable was adhered to.

  Such a system required an elaborate and expensive infrastructure and a constant attention to its day-to-day administration. This was the great achievement of the Taxis. The family spawned an extraordinary number of gifted executives. Over successive generations they proved to be energetic, robust and (especially in the sixteenth century) long lived. By the third decade of the sixteenth century there were members of the family serving as postmasters in Innsbruck, Augsburg, Brussels and Spain. Raimond de Taxis accompanied Charles V on many of his journeys, including to Tunis. Another branch of the clan provided successive masters of the papal post in Rome.5 Secure in the confidence of the imperial family, the Taxis were able to introduce further important structural changes. The establishment of a secure route between Trento and Bologna closed a notorious gap in the Italian postal network and led to a significant fall in transit times between Vienna and Rome. Postmasters began to invest in the construction of purpose-built postal stations, rather than simply making use of the best available inn. And in the 1530s the Taxis introduced the ‘ordinary’ post. Rather than sending despatches when required by the imperial administration, or when a sufficient volume of letters had accumulated
, the main route now had a fixed service, publicly advertised, leaving on a particular day of the week. This was a critical development for both business and news: it established the rhythms of the postal week that so stamped its imprint on the weekly manuscript news service, and later on the printed weekly newspapers. Indeed, the sixteenth-century novellanti could not have offered clients their service without the promise of a fixed weekly post. The ‘ordinary’ principle introduced on the Flanders–German route was soon extended to Italy, with the establishment of an ordinary post between Rome and Venice in 1541.6

  The expansion of the imperial post during the reign of Charles V created the potential for a European postal network. The liveried messengers with their staffs crowned by a flying Mercury, and the post horn to advertise their coming, would have become an increasingly familiar sight and sound. For those engaged in commerce the day of the arrival of the post became the pivot of the business week. Crowds would congregate at the post-house, ‘at the sign of Mercury’, to await the courier's arrival. The Taxis also now moved towards the advertisement of fixed rates for the carriage of letters or parcels along specified lengths of the route. The tariffs were fixed, as today, dependent on the size and weight of the letter. Given the volume of business now being conducted, these rates were increasingly affordable.7