During the early sixteenth century state postal routes, based on a sequence of horses ridden by a single rider across a series of organised stages, were developed across Europe and were progressively transformed into public services. Postal communication was fundamental to European news, and though they were by no means the only basis of communication they formed the essential spine to news networks.¹ We have two working assumptions: the first, that the penetration ofavvisiinto the public culture of early-modern Europe (i.e. beyond official communications) depended on the development of accessible postal services. The second is that (relatively) predictable...

The vocabulary for news spread across Europe with the news itself. This is evident enough in the geographical dispersal of words including gazette, avviso, mercury. However, also like the news itself, as these words were domesticated into regional languages and local news cultures they developed local inflections. Looking closely at the languages of news across Europe reveals continuities and discontinuities in practice, it identifies the movement of conventions and uncovers false friends that are evidence of both common and idiosyncratic practices.

One of the first things discovered in the workshops organised by the Leverhulme-Trust funded research network,News Networks in...

Around 1790 the Scottish antiquarian George Chalmers discovered in the British Museum a newspaper entitledThe English Mercurie, dated 1588. This was the earliest printed news serial not only in England but in Europe. Chalmers proceeded to publish (in 1794) the first attempt to sketch a history of the newspaper in Britain—and in many respects his was an imaginative exercise, and one that sensitively located innovation in its commercial and cultural circumstances.¹ Importantly his discovery meant that neither the French nor the Germans were first to invent the newspaper: at last the British had done something first. His claims...

The discourse surrounding early modern news communication is suffused with the language of networks. In this volume, and in other studies of European news, it is used to describe the infrastructure by which correspondence travelled: the postal network broadly defined; its roads and routes; the network of couriers that carried the letters. The more specialised language of nodes and hubs is used in relation to the centres where news was gathered, or entrepôts, trading posts where information could be exchanged alongside the import and export of merchandise. Similarly, the people that recorded, reported and circulated news—political officials and diplomats,...

We know quite a lot about the modalities of news transmission—diplomats, postal services, scholars, diasporic ethnic and religious communities, merchants and so on—yet, in spite of the evident promise of this Braudelian theme, we know less about the overall patterns of news transmission. The availability of new corpora and new approaches suggests new routes to discovery. Here I would like to examine what has been done and point out what could be done to trace the European news networks of early modern times using a combination of methodologies. An important tool for tracing news flows is the measurement...

Known at the time as Candia, after the former name of its capital city, Crete is the oldest colony of the Venetian Dominion.¹ The island was considered more of a burden than an asset to the Venetian economy, and indeed its commercial importance diminished after the loss of the ports of Modon and Coron, and the redirection of goods to the benefit of Zante (Zakynthos) and Corfu.² Nonetheless, it remained a symbolic jewel of the Venetian Dominion in the middle of the seventeenth century. After the loss of Cyprus, taken by the Ottomans in 1573, Crete was the Most Serene...

In terms of geography, Spain occupies a position on Europe’s periphery. This is a position that it shares with the other country of the Iberian Peninsula, Portugal, a country that, incidentally, began to publish a significant amount of periodical newssheets from the time of its independence from the kingdom of Philip iv of Spain in 1640. With respect to the production of printed and handwritten news stories, Spain was long thought not to have had a regular production of weekly miscellaneous gazettes until the publication of the Madrid-based (later printed in Saragossa)Gazeta Nueva, from 1661 onwards, which was regarded...

The sixteenth century was characterised by the unprecedentedly rapid acceleration and standardisation of the information and communication system, to an extent that would remain unparalleled until the nineteenth century and the invention of the electric telegraph.¹ The Imperial postal system and the development of written media, available to the public at large for the first time, both have their origin in the century or so between 1490 and 1605 and were an important factor in the development of a bourgeois information society during the following centuries.² Elites became more and more interested in events taking place all over Europe. Politically...

The termgazetteand its variants in some of the European languages—gazzettain Italian,gazettein French and English,gacetain Spanish,gazettenin German, though this is less common—defined a new medium of information which developed in Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The goal of this chapter is to try and reconstruct the history of this word until 1631, when it became the title of the most important printed newssheet of the Kingdom of France and assumed its current meaning. This could offer a different approach to the evolution of the phenomenon of public information...

The work done on the early periodical press by the ‘News Networks in Early Modern Europe’ project is extremely important.¹ After all, from its first appearance, early in the seventeenth century, the gazette-type periodical was quite rapidly to become the dominant model of printed news, and it has remained so ever since. However, news in print did not begin with the periodical press. From the end of the fifteenth century until the beginning of the seventeenth, the press had consisted entirely of non-periodical news pamphlets, often drafted in the form of letters and nearly always treating a single event.²

It...

The Milanese printing press made very early forays into the dissemination of news: one of the earliest printed texts in Milan wasLamento di Negroponte, a poem that narrated the siege and fall of the Venetian possessions in Greece some months after the event (12 July 1470).¹ Though it was not the first to break the news to the Milanese public, this text continued to spread, after and alongside other oral and written media; a broad-range dissemination made possible by the advent of the printing press in particular.² From this point of view, it was similar to other contemporary wide-circulation...

Sir Thomas Smith, Elizabeth I’s ambassador in France, wrote to her longest serving secretary, Sir William Cecil, in 1563 that “yf ye did understand and feele the peyne that Ambassadoures be in when thei can have no aunswer to ther lettres nor intilligence from ther prince, nor hir cownsell, ye wold pitie them I assure yow”. This pain was particularly acute, Smith went on to explain, when there were worrying rumours, such as those circulating at the French court that Queen Elizabeth was dead or very ill.¹ Smith was far from the only Elizabethan ambassador to highlight the importance of...

News tells us many things. It tells us what has happened, when and where it happened, and who was involved. It might even try to tell us why particular things have happened. Understanding what news is considered important within a society, what news is allowed, and how that news is exchanged, gets us closer to understanding those societies, both contemporary and historical. Investigations into early modern news also underscore how connected early modern communities were. Complementing traditional oral exchanges and established manuscript networks, stories about events both significant and trivial were written up, printed, read and exchanged across Europe, with...

In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam quickly developed into the main centre of the European book trade.¹ “The miracle of the world”, according to some, the growth was indeed remarkable. When Cornelis Claesz opened his shop in 1578, competition was insignificant. When he died, in 1609, thirty booksellers populated the city. In 1621, the number had grown to fifty.² By the middle of the century, the book trade had expanded to such an extent that, according to the famous estimate by De la Fontaine-Verweij, about thirty per cent of all the books published in Europe were produced...

In the past two decades the phenomenon that Harold Love called “scribal publication”—meaning the circulation of handwritten texts in a wider or narrower public form—has become visible in early modern European social and cultural history.¹ This is also true in the particular field of the history of news. Handwritten newsletters were one of the types of the “scribally published texts” identified by Love, alongside a wide array of political documents, music and poetry. Although Love’s study was centred on seventeenth century England, scribal publication existed all over early modern Europe. Moreover, in recent years a new awareness of...

These first lines of a news dispatch that was published in the weekly news pamphletMercurius Politicusin 1654 illustrate the fundamental importance of correspondence in the transmission of news in seventeenth-century Europe. With no letters arriving from England, the news writer in Uppsala did not know how treaty negotiations between England and the United Provinces were developing. Without letters the news writer was indeed ‘in the dark’. In the correspondent’s quest for information as to how events in Europe were unfolding, no mention is made of other possible news sources such as print or oral news: all that counts...

In February 1681, the English government was hunting for information about European newspapers. Its new envoy at The Hague, Thomas Plott, duly obliged by writing that “The printed paper of Leyden … I have never seen”, although he had heard that “such a paper had appeared”, and that “it had been suppressed”. That he knew this much reflected the fact that he had already made a point of getting to know “the French gazetier, who is my friend”, and who had previously been a “pensionary” of the English ambassador, Henry Sidney. Indeed, Plott also added that “what news he has...

In the seventeenth century, the great European metropolises of Paris and London saw the establishment of so-called intelligence offices, which served as places of institutionalised information brokerage and were to promote the exchange of goods, real estate and work opportunities.¹ The first known institution of this kind, theBureau d’adresse, was established near Notre-Dame in Paris in 1630; it was created on the initiative of the physician Théophraste Renaudot (1586–1653), a native of Montpellier, and undertook a number of different tasks: it acted not only as a sales agency and brokered real estate and work, but beyond that it...

The official history of the scientific serial begins in 1665. In January, Denis de Sallo, with a license from Jean-Baptiste Colbert, began publishing theJournal des Scavansat Paris; while in London Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society since the grant of its first Charter in 1662, published the first issue of hisPhilosophical Transactionsin late February.¹ These two publications have honourably divided most of the available laurels in the history of scholarly communication between them, with theJournalandPhilosophical Transactionscustomarily referred to as the world’s oldest learned and scientific periodicals respectively.

Historians of science,...

The first handwritten newsletter concerning the New World was anavvisofrom Milan to the Duke of Ferrara in 1496.¹ It announced the return of Columbus from his second voyage and the arrival of bullion from the Antilles.² One hundred years later, in 1596, the Fugger merchants in Augsburg received two handwritten newsletters announcing the amount of silver to be expected from the Americas that year. Both newsletters referred to information coming from Seville, despite increasing competition amongst European powers in the Atlantic. The first had been written in Madrid, the second had been submitted via Lyon and Madrid.³ The...

Among the most important news events in Europe in the early days of the Modern Age was the war against the Turks in the east. In Spain in particular, a set of news pamphlets addressing this topic is considered to be the first example of journalism in the full sense of the word.¹ These were the news pamphlets published by the Sevillian printer Rodrigo de Cabrera between 1595 and 1600 about the exploits against the infidels of the Prince of Transylvania, Sigismund Báthory, along with other Christian knights.² This is the first set of news pamphlets in which, although they...

The subject of this chapter is the sending of news and information from English travellers abroad to the governing circles of late Elizabethan England. A stay abroad carried with it an expectation that casual travellers, to protect and evidence their moral, spiritual and physical health, would make themselves useful, and thus loyal, servants of their domestic government: I will argue that one key method of doing so was by transmitting news and information. Immediately, this invites questions regarding what and who exactly is being discussed. Although I will not fully explore here the complexities of what is meant by ‘news’,...

In early September 1625, in a letter to his friend Sir Martin Stuteville, the Cambridge scholar Joseph Mead described women in Essex “crying & howling as if Tilbury camp were to come againe”.¹ Mead’s words hark back to an old danger: that of August 1588, when troops gathered at Tilbury in order to repulse attack by Philip II of Spain’s Armada. The women in Essex wailed, Mead writes, as if they feared a return to an event, 37 years earlier, that had become synonymous with national peril and Spanish threat.

Their fears were not abstract: the long peace between England and...

There is a natural tendency to think of civilian morale as an issue little influencing policy-makers before the Revolutionary wars of the late eighteenth century. But even in the age of mercenaries and military contractors, governments were well aware that success in war to some extent depended on the willingness of ordinary folk to bear the burdens it entailed. Public opinion might be little considered when deciding whether or not to go to war, but once the decision to fight had been taken every effort was made to convince tax-payers, in particular, that it was in their interest to see...

During the Middle Ages many European authors employed the wordChristianitas—or vernacular synonyms such as, in English, Christianity or Christendom—instead of the geographical notion ‘Europe’ to identify their continent. Although medieval geographers continued to use the word ‘Europe’, an essentially neutral term at the time, the Roman Catholic Church was particularly influential in promoting the wordChristianitas. The Catholic clergy hoped to make clear that Europe was a Christian world and Europeans were Christians. As Denys Hay concluded in his pioneering introduction to Europe as an idea, in this era the term Europe was “devoid of sentiment”, while...

There is an emerging orthodoxy in our understanding of how early-modern information became news. ‘Information’, in this context, refers to what is learned, processed and stocked from others, and whose worth is related to the rarity value that it possesses.¹ ‘News’ is its subsequent transmission into another, possibly more public, environment. That orthodoxy relies on several elements, which generate, in turn, a chronology of change.² Firstly, there was the emergence of a group of specialists in the gathering of information, its collation, evaluation, filing, and subsequent transmission as news. Secondly, that specialism grew out of an increasing density of information...

Borrowed word for word from the eleventh issue of the “historical and politicalmercure” Lettres sur les matières du tempsdated 15 June 1689, these few lines of Henri de Limiers’Histoire de Louis xivconstitute a narrative of what the author called “the hostilities of France against the Empire” at the beginning of the Nine Years War (1688–97).² By placing news at the heart of history with amise en abymebetween historical writing and periodical writing, this narrative brings the reader, almost 30 years after the fact, from “public News” to history through printed news, into the...

Henri of Navarre’s attempt to seize Paris in 1590 was followed by interested consumers of news throughout early modern Europe; his exploits were published in various news pamphlets in the German lands, England and the Dutch Republic.¹ His assault on Paris failed, because the Spanish-Habsburg army under the command of the governor-general of the Habsburg Netherlands, Alexander Farnese, came to relieve the city. This news was printed on the Italian peninsula in various cities, such as Rome, Milan, Turin and Bologna.²

Andrew Pettegree noted this Italian interest in an article on the print connections between France and the Low Countries,...

The French Wars of Religion (1562–98) were one of the central conflicts in Europe in the period of confessionalisation. They received an enormous amount of attention in news media in France as well as in neighbouring countries. News on the wars circulated Europe-wide, orally, in handwritten and in printed form: French prints, translations or compendiums, spread across Europe in the form of polemics, declarations, poems, copies of letters, portraits, allegories and plays, to name only a few genres.¹

In the Holy Roman Empire, there was a vast amount of news available, circulating in letters, handwrittenavvisi, printed broadsheets and...

The central role thatavvisiplayed in the intelligence gathering of the Medici court was acknowledged in a letter of 4 August 1602 written by Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici to his Spanish agent in Valladolid. Ferdinando was sending the agent a French newsletter that was to be shared only with the duke of Lerma. In Ferdinando’s words, the newsletter was “of some importance, being so rare both the news from your parts, and the insights into such affairs”.¹

Much of the explanation for why newsletters—oravvisias they were called in Italian—occupied such a fundamental place...

In early modern Europe books were not only sold inside bookshops. Especially ordinary or everyday editions—those books printed and reprinted without any major changes to text or to typography, and the smallest works, such as histories, miracles, prayer books, news reports and songs—were often brought out on the street and sold around the city at the most populous places, such as squares, bridges and in front of churches.¹ At the root of this strategy, and underpinning the relationship between these editions and the ways they were sold, there were—of course—commercial reasons: “more people, more money” was...

The circulation of news about natural calamities in early modern Europe can be analysed from different points of view. This text will concentrate on the development of the news network about natural disasters in the context of the history of the circulation of news, from its beginning with manuscript newssheets oravvisithrough to the complex and more fully articulated network developed throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. In particular, I will focus on the news that crossed political or linguistic borders. It is no easy task to consider this subject exhaustively. One of the crucial points is the quantities...

This passage is taken from the epilogue of the tragicomedyThe Rebellion of Naplesorthe Tragedy of Masaniello, written by the anonymous author T.B. The plot follows the life events of the young Neapolitan Tommaso Aniello d’Amalfi, better known as Masaniello, who became the leader of a popular revolt which broke out on 7 July 1647 in the Piazza Mercato in Naples. Naples was, in the mid-seventeenth century, the second or third most populous city in modern Europe.² The trigger for the uprising was the imposition of a new tax on fruit introduced by the Spanish viceroy, the Duke...

Behind the printed piece of news are concealed different networks, usually invisible. The problem of the newswriter’s sources and the networks underlying them is one of the most difficult questions in the study of early modern periodicals. The main question this case study addresses is precisely this relation, between the operation of a network and the making of news. I focus on a single event, namely the announcement of the declaration of war of the Turks against the Empire.

The map of the ordinary news published in the FrenchGazettein 1683 shows twenty major cities which share and dominate...

Located in the crook of the Carpathian Mountains, the principality of Transylvania was on the edge of European Christendom, outside of the postal networks through which most news was transmitted, yet still intermittingly involved in wider European affairs. After a successful rebellion against the Habsburgs from 1604–6, Transylvania established itself as largely autonomous, though it remained under Ottoman suzerainty, and was governed by a series of martial, Reformed princes elected by a diet. Three of these men conducted military campaigns which were of particular interest to the newspapers of the day. The most famous is Gábor Bethlen who led...

On 23 August 1514, after a long march across Turkey, the Ottoman army of Selim I finally encountered the Persian troops of Shah Ismail on the plain of Chaldiran, north-east of Lake Van, in present day northwestern Iran. It was the culmination of a great military campaign, successfully conducted by Selim: in Chaldiran, with the decisive support of the artillery, the Ottomans were able to defeat their enemy, opening their way to Tabriz.¹

Selim took Tabriz, though he later left the city and did not pursue his conquest of the Persian territories further; nevertheless, he prostrated Ismail’s military power and...