NEWS UNFIT to PRINT in the Early Modern Period Political Information

1 CHAPTER 1: NEWS UNFIT TO PRINT In the early modern period political information became a commodity. Not in the modern sense, of course. Communications of knowledge or intelligence about political affairs did not crackle through the air, even figuratively. Few and contradictory were the assumptions about what might be a reasonable dosage of consciousness about the political environment, and what statements were made on the subject, usually by critics, lawyers or consultants to the various emerging state governments, took account of the deep social stratifications and differences in education that marked this age. What you knew about affairs within the corridors of power depended upon who you were. A lawyer or a doctor was likely to be better informed than a butcher or a baker. What you knew also depended on where you were; and not all cities were alike. Paris was better served by information than was Strasbourg. And the strands of urban Europe reached thinly from center to center across vast stretches of landscape, where the political environment seemed far less crucial than the natural environment to the daily practices of existence. And even though the passage of troops from one battle to the next, just as the movement of prices between boom and bust, could intrude profoundly into an otherwise self-contained and autarchic village culture, nevertheless, political knowledge and intelligence extended unevenly and with great difficulty beyond the great demographic 2 concentrations. Still, in this period, political information came to be bought and sold in appreciable quantities for the first time. The distribution of such knowledge and intelligence became a definite trade, while the mechanisms for this distribution slowly evolved. The results of this commerce now appear to have been as far removed from easy assumptions about the role of information in society as the structures for its production were from later and more familiar ones. How was the world of information lived and experienced three centuries ago? The archives in a few well-selected areas offer unusually rich material for our conjectures. And what our sources show is that the most daring peddlers of news about military, dynastic and administrative affairs, at least at first, were not large printing houses or journalism tycoons, but writers and distributors of the so-called "avvisi" or handwritten newsletters serving customers all over Europe. 1 These writers and distributors included respectable officials in government and ecclesiastical bureaucracies as well as a motley crew of lawyers, notaries, scribes, literary hacks, spies, unemployed intellectuals and even murderers and extortionists. Forging the new genre from a hybrid of diplomatic and commercial correspondence, they began to circulate their newsletters on a weekly or semi-weekly basis by the latter half of the sixteenth century. In spite of almost continuous persecution, they eventually provided, along with plain information and misinformation, the most mordant and incisive running commentary on and criticism of contemporary governments available anywhere. 2 3 They made up the information underground of the seventeenth century that the following pages will describe. Threatened by almost continuous persecution and, eventually, by competition from the closely related and also newly emerging genre of printed newspapers, they would still not go away. And their persistence until well into the eighteenth century can be explained only by measuring the powerful yearnings they satisfied and tracing the powerful social and political structures from which they sprang. At the heart of the newsletter story, it will be seen, were the emerging state structures. So at least part of what follows has already been told elsewhere. Political information of the kind with which we are concerned here was a byproduct of a political leadership struggling to achieve some measure of central control. Writers and distributors were often connected in one way or another, either as employees or as clients, with the mechanisms being used by rulers in the struggle—from diplomatic corps to postal bureaux to notarial and judicial colleges. 3 Moreover, the episodes connected with the building of the new state structures often formed the substance of communications: wars, rebellions, changes of rule, and the day- to-day exercise of authority. Without those structures a chief raison d'être and probably the newsletters themselves would have ceased to exist. However, viewing the newsletters as mere government departments would be a serious mistake. They led lives of their own and affected the exercise of power in unique ways, as we shall see. 4 Economic structures too played their role. Political information was no less useful in business than in government. And by the time newsletters emerged in the late sixteenth century, correspondence within the largest commercial firms—the Fugger, the Strozzi—had carried political news almost as long as had diplomatic correspondence between governments and their representatives. 4 Commercial considerations were at least as important as political ones in the creation of the first public mail routes in this period by a fruitful collaboration between private firms and the governments of Europe. These routes were essential to the efforts of the people we are about to meet, who turned newsletter writing into a profession. And no sooner did newsletters begin to proliferate than they became objects of commercial exchange themselves. And as objects of commercial exchange, they responded to market conditions. So that newsletters were at least as much children of capitalism as of the early modern state. To be sure, the world of the newsletters, conceived as widely as possible, shaded off into the world of espionage and involved many different kinds of manuscript communication. At one end of the spectrum were carefully planted espionage sheets not intended for public distribution, secret manuscript pamphlets, including diplomatic reports as well as the so-called "conclaves" listing party alignments among the cardinals in Rome and occasionally attacking the institution of the papacy itself; next came semi- private libels like the German Schandbriefe intended mainly to offend the party in question. 5 At the opposite end of the 5 spectrum stood more or less public pasquinades, some resembling the English ballads, as well as reports prepared by one or another of the parties in specific episodes—the Genoa civil war, the revolt of Naples, the revolt of Palermo, the revolt of Messina—and satirical works with titles like "Vomit of the gods," "Consultation with the Grand Turk," and "Dialogue between St. Peter and the Lantern of Diogenes." 6 None of these writings, whether secret or public, could be entirely prevented from circulating, and action against them was sporadic. Regular weekly or semi-weekly newsletters were a separate genre, as anyone knows who has sifted through the records of a sixteenth or seventeenth-century diplomatic archive. They were distinguished by their nearly invariable form across two centuries. Supplied with place name and date at the top instead of a standard salutation, they were as difficult to confuse with simple private letters as they were with the avisos and other ephemeral pre-newspaper printed works that were produced in every country on the continent. They were what passed for journalism in early modern Europe before printed newspapers arrived. 7 Although they succeeded in producing considerable incredulity among their readers and preoccupation among government officials along the way, they helped bring about important changes in social thought and political behavior. And they are our chief objects here. The newsletters were also distinguished by their writers' almost exclusive concern with information about politics, as defined by seventeenth-century conventions. Like the historians who followed the classical and Renaissance definition of the 6 object of history in focussing exclusively on affairs of state, the newsletter writers invariably wrote about the behavior of those wielding power. Occasionally they might carry stories concerning the punishment of a criminal or violence against the local Jews. But they covered such events for the same reasons why they covered the marriages of dukes and princes—namely, because power was exercised then or else because convictions about the nature of power were expressed. Let us see how the social and economic mechanisms behind the newsletters are revealed in the motives and ambitions of the writers, in what went on inside their studios, and most of all, in their writings. The Information Underground We soon discover that the way a newsletter writer wrote depended to a considerable extent on the interests in play. Very often, a careful reading of the document reveals a definite partisanship for one or the other of the many sides to the power struggles of the age. Indeed, we should scarcely be surprised to find that Alessandro Botticelli, writing in 1630s Genoa, a city divided between the pro-French merchants and the pro-Spanish old nobility, tailored his accounts for customers among the latter. Nor should we be surprised that Theodore Ameyden, writing his newsletters from Rome in the 1640s for officials in the Spanish government, let his love and loyalty for Spain show through in every line. 8 He, after all, was expressing his own heartfelt convictions; although whether the same might be said about 7 Benedetto Giuliani, who wrote newsletters from Venice as a French spy, with obvious consequences for his interpretations, is another 8 matter. 9 Most certainly in the case of Giovanni Quorli, also in Venice, interpretations depended on whether, at a specific moment, he happened to be writing for the duke of Brunswick, the elector of Cologne, the duke of Mirandola or any of his many other foreign customers. At least when it came to writing about the War of Candia, capitalizing on the suspicion and envy that the Venetians often excited among their neighbors, he consistently reported events in the most sinister light—to the joy of his correspondents but to the chagrin of the Venetian ambassador in Florence, in whose view they were "truly malevolent, and .

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