The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (20 page)

Within the colonies of diplomatic representatives that gathered in Rome, Venice and elsewhere, we can detect two contrasting strategies for diplomatic representation. England, admittedly one of the minor players, made great use of Italian nationals, rather in the pattern of today's consular representatives.
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Charles V, and Philip II after him, always appointed Spanish noblemen. There were advantages to both strategies. The native Italians could move smoothly among the indigenous noble and merchant communities, and doubts as to their loyalty to the foreign power they served seem largely to have been unfair. The Spanish ambassadors represented their masters with energy and passion, but sometimes failed to appreciate why Italians did not accept the
pax Hispanica
as the natural order. They also frequently felt disliked and frozen out of the gossip and exchange of information that were the essential lubricants of diplomatic life. But as members of the highest caste of Spanish society they were adept at reading the implications attached, for instance, to the welcome given to the emissary of a rival power.
¹⁴
This was an age in which shifts in policy were often signified by public gestures: affection shown to a nobleman restored to favour, a visiting prince or a likely suitor; slights to those whose fortunes were on the wane. None of this escaped the eye of the astute diplomat, and news of this sort filled reams of ambassadorial despatches.

Papal elections were among the great news events of the sixteenth century, marking as they did the potential for major shifts in policy and alliances. Since they were so different from the hereditary succession of nation states, papal elections were difficult to plan for, though ambassadors were obliged to try. The characters and loyalties of the potential popes among the cardinals were the subject of obsessive diplomatic interest: Spanish ambassadors sent back to Spain copious dossiers detailing the characters, wealth, ambitions and – crucially – state of health of the significant figures. A series of profiles of over fifty cardinals compiled by ambassador Luis de Requeséns in 1565 ran to forty-eight pages.
¹⁵

Ambassadors were well aware that the election of a pro or anti-imperial Pope could either consolidate or threaten Spanish power in the peninsula. Every election was hotly contested, as France, in particular, seized the opportunity to reverse by diplomacy the consequences of successive battlefield defeats. The resident ambassador bore much of the burden of this warfare of whispers and insincere promises, but this sort of multi-dimensional chess was deeply unpredictable. News of the election of Giovanni Maria del Monte (Julius III) in 1550 was greeted with joy in Paris, since he had been a prominent name on Charles V's blacklist.
¹⁶
In fact he proved a good friend to Habsburg pretensions until the two fell out over the war of Parma in 1551. But this was as nothing to the disaster of the election of the Neapolitan Gian Pietro Carafa (Paul IV) in 1555, whose hatred of Spanish domination of his homeland was deep and unshakable. Any hope of rapprochement probably died the following year when the Spanish ambassador, finding himself unrecognised by the guard at the city gate, battered down the door to force an entry.
¹⁷

Despite Spain's domination of the Italian Peninsula, this was a difficult posting and many ambassadorial careers ended in failure. Both of Philip II's first two ambassadors left in high dudgeon having antagonised the Pope. Spanish emissaries found the shifting, multi-polar politics of Venice equally difficult to fathom. Diplomacy was a new trade, requiring discreet charm and subtle skill. Not all ambassadors realised that if they became the story the game was probably lost.

Espionage

As these examples suggest, the development of a network of permanent diplomatic representation was not always a force for harmony. The high-minded principles enunciated by Bernard du Rosier in 1436 had been replaced by more pragmatic nostrums. The Venetian scholar-diplomat Ermolao Barbaro, writing in 1490, set out the new doctrine with brutal clarity. ‘The first duty of an ambassador is exactly the same as that of any other servant of government, that is, to do, say, advise and think whatever may best serve the preservation and aggrandizement of his own state.’
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The tortured conflicts of the Reformation era added further layers of peril and distrust to international relations. Diplomats of the major powers had to ply their trade in an atmosphere of increasing distrust and hostility. Previously routine connections and hospitality became potentially compromising for citizens of the host country. ‘It is impossible for me to find out anything certain at present here,’ reported the Count of Feria, Philip II's first ambassador to Queen Elizabeth. ‘Nobody wants to talk to me; people flee from me as if I were the devil.’
¹⁹

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.
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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.
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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.
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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:

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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These digests of political information, 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.