The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (31 page)

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 system 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

I
T
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

Impressive though this was, the Taxis’ imperial service was still some way short of offering a fully functioning and integrated European postal network. In France the ambitious system laid out by Louis XI in the fifteenth century had largely fallen into decay. Paris and Blois were served by couriers on the imperial routes, and Lyon was a major postal hub between Spain and Germany; but the restrictions of the French royal system left many parts of the kingdom unserved.

The reform of the French royal post was taken in hand in the brief reign of Francis II (1559–60).
⁸
This was another period of internal political tension, a time of intense partisan agitation before the outbreak of the French wars of religion. The new decree introduced several postal routes, radiating out from Paris to the kingdom's frontiers, with two important lateral routes from Lyon to Marseille and Blois to Nantes. The arterial road from Paris to Bordeaux and onward to the Spanish frontier had fifty-three stages. The decree stipulated payments including stipends for twelve ferrymen: a reminder that not even all main roads were continuously linked by bridges, even at this point. Whether the reorganised French system worked in practice is also to be doubted. Within years France had been plunged into turmoil by
the outbreak of the Huguenot rebellion. Fighting continued intermittently for forty years, rendering the already notorious French road system even more perilous.