The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (4 page)

CHAPTER 1

Power and Imagination

M
AXIMILIAN
I, Holy Roman Emperor between 1493 and 1519, was not the most astute of rulers. Despite a whirlwind of travel, diplomacy and optimistic dynastic alliances, he never succeeded in asserting control over his large and dispersed dominions. Even before his election as emperor, he had so inflamed opinion in the Low Countries that in 1488 the people of Bruges held him hostage for seven months until he capitulated to their demands. Always chronically in debt, on one other occasion he was forced to flee his German creditors by slipping out of Augsburg under cover of darkness. This was neither very dignified nor very imperial.

Yet Maximilian usually seemed to triumph over adversity. A combination of extraordinary resilience and restless scheming ensured that his grandson, Charles V, would inherit from Maximilian an even more formidable collection of territories, encompassing a large part of the European land mass. Maximilian also had imagination. He harnessed the power of the innovation of printing more effectively than any contemporary ruler.
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And in 1490 he embarked on a project that would have enormous resonance for the history of communication: he determined to create an imperial postal service.

At this time Maximilian ruled over an unusual combination of territories. As co-administrator with his father, Emperor Frederick III, he ruled the Habsburg lands in Austria and south Germany; through his first wife, Mary of Burgundy, he was also effective ruler of the Netherlands as regent for his young son Philip. A later marriage, to the daughter of the Duke of Milan, opened the prospect of further dynastic aggrandisement but also brought him into persistent conflict with the kings of France, inevitable rivals for supremacy in Italy. Juggling these complex possessions and constantly on the move, Maximilian needed to have the most up-to-date political intelligence. It was with this in mind that in 1490 he summoned to Innsbruck two members of an
Italian family of communications specialists, Francesco and Janetto de Tassis.
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The two men were the sons of Alessandro Tassis, who had built his reputation by organising the papal courier service, the
Maestri dei Corrieri
. Francesco had subsequently gained experience with similar projects in Milan and Venice. Now Maximilian engaged the two sons to establish a regular postal service that would cross Europe: from Innsbruck in Austria to his Netherlandish capital at Brussels. The agreement made provision for the establishment of regularly spaced and permanently manned stages: the couriers were to ride at an average speed of 7.5 kilometres per hour, covering up to 180 kilometres per day. In 1505 a new contract extended the range of this network to embrace stations in Spain, at Granada and Toledo, where Maximilian's son Philip now resided as co-ruler.

Like so many of Maximilian's grand schemes, this was only partly successful. It would take another hundred years before the imperial postal network was fully functioning. But from these beginnings would eventually emerge a communications network that underpins much of what we will encounter in this book: the beginnings of a commercial market for news, and the first regular serial news publications.

It is hard to know what inspired Maximilian to take this momentous step, but in creating such an ambitious scheme he, like so many of his Renaissance
contemporaries, sought inspiration from the ancients. With the help of Francesco de Tassis, Maximilian had the chance to recreate a plausible imitation of the postal network of the old Roman Empire – until this point the most spectacularly successful communications system known to civilisation.

1.1 Two portraits of the Emperor Maximilian. The Habsburgs were not a handsome family, though the artistry of Albrecht Dürer could at least invest Maximilian with a certain majesty.

The passage of time had done much to obliterate the physical remains, if not the memory, of the Roman Empire; but the imprint of the Roman communications system had proved remarkably enduring. It would be the ghostly presence hovering in the background as medieval Europe gradually began to construct its own system of news and communication.

The Ghosts of Vindolanda

Like so much of what had been created during the Roman Empire, the Roman postal service was an achievement of breathtaking imagination and administrative ambition. The Roman road network had been designed to move large bodies of troops around a militarised domain that stretched from Spain to Germany and from Britain to Asia Minor. A high-speed courier service was an essential part of the information and administrative infrastructure that underpinned this system. Although much of the engineering work was in place under the Republic, the postal service itself only became fully established during the reign of Emperor Augustus.
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Couriers travelled by horse or by carriage. The main stage posts were established eight miles apart, with night quarters at every third stage. This suggests that a courier would normally progress at the rate of about 25 miles a day. Fifty miles would be possible if the news was especially urgent, but the journey would take a terrible toll on the messenger if the distance to be travelled was very large.

Normally a single courier would carry the message the entire length of the journey. In principle a relay of messengers could travel in greater comfort, but many messages were so confidential that they could only be entrusted to a particular individual. Very often the written message was little more than an introduction, confirming the credentials of the bearer; the substance would then be delivered verbally. The same messenger could then take back a reply. According to Suetonius, Augustus, who took a personal interest in the establishment of the post, also regularised the practice of dating letters, even to the exact hour, to document when they had been despatched.

The imperial postal service was created explicitly to serve the purposes of the vast Roman administrative machine. The upkeep of the service was extremely expensive, particularly after the development of more elaborate rest stations (
mansiones
), where travellers could find accommodation, stabling and a change of horses. The system was not generally open to the public. Yet
the management of the Empire demanded the transport of a large quantity of military freight along the roads, alongside the express courier service, and it seems that this more mundane traffic provided plentiful opportunities for the citizens of the Empire, dispersed around the distant outposts, to maintain a surprising level of written communication.

The full extent of this can only be guessed at: most of the evidence has long since disappeared. But a glimpse into this lost world opened up quite recently, thanks to a remarkable find at Hadrian's Wall, near the northern British frontier of the Roman Empire. In 1973 a team of archaeologists was continuing routine excavations at Vindolanda, one of the military camp settlements adjacent to the wall. Excavating a trench they came across a mass of leather, textiles and straw, mixed with bracken and wood. Some of the wood was in small, thin fragments. When they inspected these slivers, it became apparent that these were covered in writing. What had been discovered were the first of nearly two thousand writing tablets, all written in ink on a wooden veneer – somehow miraculously preserved in the anaerobic soil of Northumberland.
⁴

The wooden tablets found in this excavation have transformed what is known of the writing culture of the northern Empire. Britain was as far away as it was possible to be from the production centres of papyrus, the versatile
reed that provided the cheapest and most abundant writing material in Roman times. Where papyrus was not available, officials used waxed wooden tablets, where notes could be inscribed in the wax. A large number of these were also found in the Vindolanda excavation, though with little or nothing still legible once the wax had disappeared. The slivers of wood discovered at Vindolanda, subsequently confirmed by other finds, reveal a whole new writing medium, and one open to a wide cross section of the general public. The tablets, now in the British Museum, preserve communications from over one hundred writers, from the local governor and his wife to relatively humble members of the garrison community.

1.2 Fragments of a wooden writing tablet from Vindolanda. This contains the draft of a letter from a prefect of Vindolanda to a certain Crispinus.

The ghosts of Vindolanda are often no more than tiny and incomplete fragments of enigmatic and cryptic messages. Yet they reveal a writing community of depth and breadth even in a frontier outpost at the very edge of the Empire, manned, it should be remembered, not by Roman legionaries but by auxiliaries raised from other subject peoples. We do not know how widespread were the skills of reading and writing in the Roman Empire.
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But what can be inferred from the Vindolanda tablets is that even when societies were not highly literate, systems of government and administration could be built around the assumption that written communication was a normative means of conveying news.

The Romans were of course masters in the exercise of power. The creation of the imperial postal service reflected a recognition that the control of information, and the swift passage of vital news, was essential to the government of widely dispersed and thinly garrisoned possessions. Roman Britain was an archetype of the large province managed by an astonishingly small occupying force. It was only possible because the control of communications meant that a larger, irresistible force could swiftly be marshalled.

The Roman postal service died with the Empire, to be resurrected only by the equally ambitious German emperors at the turn of the sixteenth century. But the main lesson of the Roman communications network, that control of news was an essential attribute of power, was fully grasped in medieval Europe. We will see it reflected in the conduct of all three of the major power brokers in the medieval world: the Church, the State and the merchant class. All three would develop a vivid culture of news.

From the Cloister

The Church was one of the great estates of medieval Europe. Its institutions had played a crucial role in the preservation of learning after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Since membership of the clerical estate was essentially defined
by literacy, it was inevitable that the clergy would be the designated record-keepers of early medieval society. As the Church consolidated its reach across the whole of western Europe, it would also be in the forefront in the transition from a culture where inherited wisdom was preserved by memory to one of written record.
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Not that the assumed superiority of writing would go entirely uncontested. In the various confrontations between secular and ecclesiastical power that erupted in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, lay folk were not always prepared to concede that verbal reports were any less authoritative than, as they put it, ‘words written on animal skins’.
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This well-turned insult drew attention to the rather unromantic origins of parchment, which was at this point the only abundantly available writing material. Parchment, made of the dried hide of sheep or calves, was a good, reliable and durable writing surface, but complex and expensive to prepare. The writing surface had to follow the irregular dimensions of the original hide, so notes were often written on thin slips cut from the edges. So for all but the most ceremonial purposes, such as a charter or treaty, there was a strong incentive to keep messages short. Often, as in Roman times, written communications would simply attest to the trustworthiness of the messenger, who could deliver the substance of the message verbally. Parchment could also be reused, but then important documentary information is often lost because a text has been scraped off and overwritten. This means that the information culture of the early medieval period often has to be reconstructed from very fragmentary remains.