The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (18 page)

4.4 Raining corn. Johann Wick was equally keen on these tales of inspiring miracles.

This was a story that would tell itself. In other prose accounts the moral was more overtly drawn. For pastor Johannes Füglin of Basel, the horrible murders committed by a young weaver, Paul Schumacher, was a classic tale of descent into vice, from Godless idleness into the clutches of the Devil. But it was also part of a larger pattern of moral decay: ‘In the shedding of human blood, such shocking and horrifying cases have sometimes also occurred in the past, but more and more in the present day.’
⁴⁶

It is no surprise that these sensational cases attracted the most attention in print, sometimes far away from the location of the crime and long after it had occurred. Waldis's broadsheet text was printed three times in 1551, and once more over twenty years later. Given the common assumption, voiced systematically from the nineteenth century, that such sensationalism panders mostly
to the tastes of the lower classes, it is instructive to note that its status in early news reporting was far more respectable.
⁴⁷
The authors were clergymen, the readers mostly members of comfortable burgher households. This is not inherently surprising. These were the sort of citizens who had most to fear from servants and apprentices who turned bad or greedy, and attacked their employers or vulnerable family members. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century societies were inherently dangerous and risky; it required boldness and fortitude to claw one's way through the multiple hazards to security and prosperity. The irony is that the most avid consumers of these crime pamphlets were those who had achieved a measure of stability and material success. They served as a reminder that even in the most orderly households danger lurked unpredictably around every corner; the peace and order so painstakingly constructed could be overturned in an instant. The sixteenth century was not the only one in which crime was most feared and retribution most actively supported by those least likely to be directly affected.

Witches

It is perhaps not surprising, given the strong theological undertow exhibited in the crime reporting, that news publications also reveal an increasing concern with witchcraft. There can be no doubt that print played a large and malignant role in fuelling the witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
⁴⁸
Up to this point Church leaders had retained a degree of sceptical distance from demands to pursue witchcraft prosecutions. The Austrian Inquisitor Henry Kramer, an early enthusiast of witch-hunting, had a chilly relationship with the local bishop, who threatened to expel him by force if he remained in the diocese. Kramer turned the tables by having his witch-hunting manual printed. Although the
Malleus Maleficarum
failed to win approval from university theologians, it was an instant publishing success.
⁴⁹
The
Malleus Maleficarum
took its place in libraries as a handbook of persecution; alongside a contemporary rival publication by Ulrich Molitor it established an important and popular new genre of learned publication.
⁵⁰

The manuals taught people how to search out and prosecute witches; news pamphlets enthusiastically reported the consequences. We can reconstruct in some detail the emergence of witch trials as news events through the notorious case of a woman who was executed after having set fire to the town of Schiltach in the Black Forest in 1533. An account of her trial appeared in print little more than a week later, to be reprinted in Leipzig, on the other side of Germany, within a few weeks. The case acquired its greatest notoriety when the Nuremberg publisher commissioned a woodcut from the artist Erhard
Schön, which was then issued as a broadsheet. Obviously the text had to be greatly simplified, but this only added to its sensational impact. It was this version that Wick obtained, years later, to paste into his scrapbooks.
⁵¹

According to Christopher Froben, by this time the ‘devil of Schiltach’ had become proverbial throughout Germany. If this was so, it could only have been due to the success of the case as a media event. Not everyone approved. When in 1535 a Strasbourg printer applied for a licence to print another account of these events, the magistrates refused. At this point they were prepared to say of their illustrious and serious-minded city, ‘We don't do devils.’
⁵²
But the tide of history was running against them. The Protestant Reformation certainly intensified the sense of an intense conflict between God and the Devil; books describing the Devil and his cohorts poured off the presses, and filled the sermons of the Lutheran pastors. Predictably, the resulting trials and executions created work for the news prints.

Some intellectuals continued to call for restraint, led notably by the Dutch physician Johann Weyer.
⁵³
But if the learned texts left room for doubt and qualifications, this was seldom true of the pamphlets, and even less so of the broadsheets. By the last quarter of the sixteenth century, news broadsheets were reporting mass executions of witches in various parts of Germany and Alsace. One described how the Devil had summoned an assembly of witches to the castle at Colmar, to which five hundred flew on cats or calves.
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On this occasion over one hundred witches were executed. In such reports the notion of the suffering individual was wholly lost in the sensation conveyed of horrific threat and massive retribution. These pamphlets added yet one more layer of blood-curdling insecurity to the anxieties articulated in other tales of wonder, sensation and crime.

The sixteenth century had demonstrated that print could be a vital tool of state-building. Used with subtlety and care, the news prints allowed Europe's rulers to take the wider political nation into their confidence, and marshal patriotic loyalty to their dynastic ambitions. Printed ordinances enabled the state to extend the range of government functions, and make known to all levels of society the need for regulation or taxation. This was one of the most impressive and effective ways in which the culture of news was exploited for the shaping of society. But the people of Europe were far from passive recipients of this news. They had their own views; they could compare what was expressed officially in print with what they heard on the streets. Increasingly they developed their own news values, stoking a commercial market that could, if unrestrained, threaten the delicate order that the state had sought to promote. It was a harbinger of dangerous times.

CHAPTER 5

Confidential Correspondents

B
Y
the middle of the sixteenth century the development of printing had had a profound impact on the availability of news throughout Europe. Those who wished to keep abreast of current events now had access to a profusion of printed pamphlets and broadsheets. These news prints were among the cheapest books for sale, many retailing for a penny or its equivalent. For those privileged groups who had been the principal consumers of news in medieval Europe these developments were in many ways unsettling. In the old world, news had been essentially a private and intimate transaction, exchanged between trusted individuals. Because you knew your correspondent, you knew how to weigh up the value of his news: his reputation stood behind it.
¹
But how could you say that of a news pamphlet published often by an unknown printer in a faraway place, and now spread promiscuously around the marketplace? News was now a commercial transaction. Did this not undermine the credit of the information? How could one know what to believe from these unknown anonymous correspondents? Were they exaggerating for effect, or just to make money?

Questions of this sort were particularly pertinent for the traditional clients of news in medieval society: Europe's rulers and merchants. They might study pamphlets to take the temperature of public debate, but they needed their own sources of news for more precise intelligence. For those in positions of power, the confidential despatch remained the touchstone of reliability. Among Europe's elites, the exchange of news continued to rely on tried and tested systems of information gathering: through conversation, observation, and, where all else failed, espionage. This tradition of news gathering was not superseded by the birth of commercial news print; indeed, in many ways the networks of confidential correspondence strengthened and intensified as postal networks improved and it became easier to maintain regular
connections across national boundaries. Private citizens continued to rely on their friends to send them the news. In troubled times governments leaned heavily on their resident ambassadors for information and informed advice.

In the sixteenth century this yearning for swift and reliable information also led to the establishment of the first private news offices, dealing in confidential news on a subscription basis. These news agencies, with their commercially distributed manuscript news-sheets, are by far the least known of the communication media of the period. But these agencies would play an essential role in creating an international news network in the age before the newspaper. For two centuries their news-sheets, or
avvisi
as they were known, would be the touchstone of reliability for those who needed to keep abreast of events – and who could afford to pay the subscriptions.

Diplomats, of course, furnished their own confidential briefings and advice. The resident ambassador was meant to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff: to bring his experience to bear to distinguish rumour from fact, and offer his own sage judgement of the local political situation. But the ambassadors too were avid readers of the
avvisi
. Sometimes it seemed to their princely employers that they did little more than take the manuscript news-letters and prepare their own digest. A new news medium had been invented; and like the craft of diplomacy itself, its origins must be sought in Renaissance Italy.

The Business of Peace

The sixteenth century was the great age of Renaissance diplomacy. It had taken some time for a network of diplomatic representatives to become wideless spread throughout Europe. Although the Italian city states had been exchanging ambassadors since the fifteenth century, the larger kingdoms held to night back: at the accession of Francis I in 1515, France had only one resident ambassador. When he died in 1547, there were ten.
²
Ambassadors had become a major adornment of the Renaissance court, a vital symbol of their nations’ status in the European state system. Usually drawn from the higher social echelons of their own country, the ambassadors would be expected to move easily among their peers, sharing courtesies and information. Their personalities, scheming and not infrequent struggles for precedence were the subject of much animated comment.

Fourteenth-century diplomatic theory envisaged an embassy as the response to a particular problem, to resolve an issue or conclude an alliance between two states, rather than as a permanent state of residency. In practice, the distinction was quickly dissolved. While a special embassy might be despatched
to propose a diplomatic marriage, treaties or alliances could seldom be concluded so rapidly. Ambassadors rarely had full licence to close the inevitable gaps between the negotiating positions of the two parties. So an embassy might drag on, as the ambassador sought further instructions, often to the weary envoy's intense frustration.