The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (6 page)

The most famous of all pilgrimage sites, and one of the most popular, was the fountainhead of the Western Church, Rome.
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A remarkable number of pilgrims made what was truly a demanding journey, involving as it did, for non-Italians, either a perilous sea journey or a trek across the Alpine passes. When Pope Boniface VIII declared a plenary indulgence for pilgrims who visited the Holy Basilica in 1300, about two hundred thousand pilgrims made the trip. The Jubilee was repeated in 1350 and at intervals thereafter. As pilgrims converged on the Italian Peninsula, finding the right road would have been made easier by having to hand one of a number of route maps prepared for their benefit. These route finders were convenient handwritten rolls, listing the staging points on the route, often with the distances between them. One such route map, the itinerary of Bruges, carries the traveller from the heart of Flanders and down the Rhine.
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It sketched out what would become, in later centuries, Europe's first great information super-highway.

The pre-eminence of Rome as a pilgrimage site had been greatly enhanced by the role of successive popes in leading calls for the recovery of the Holy Land during the three centuries of the Crusades. In the later Middle Ages the city was a natural centre of news and international politics. Its right to claim financial support from all provinces of the Western Church led to large transfers of money, for which purpose the Church made extensive use of the emerging network of international finance. The need to seek papal approval for appointments, dispensations and annulments required a constant flow of letters and petitioners. The medieval papacy's active intervention in European power politics also attracted attention, from fellow Italians in particular but potentially also from other states. Rome was therefore the first place where many states established their own representatives. The birth of diplomacy, a natural generator of news, gossip and intrigue, was in many respects partly accidental. The journey to Rome was long and papal business slow. While travellers recuperated and waited patiently to conduct business, they would see the sights and often write home. They became, more by chance than intention, the first ambassadors.
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For much of this period the authority and even the location of papal power were fiercely contested. Between 1309 and 1376 seven successive popes resided in the papal enclave of Avignon in southern France, after the newly elected Clement V declined to move to Rome. For these seventy years, before
the Great Schism led to the establishment of competing centres of authority in Avignon and Rome, Avignon became the centre of Church business, drawing to it much of the bureaucratic apparatus previously established at Rome. This included a very considerable information network. Fourteenth-century paper registers include at least six thousand pieces of correspondence: twenty letters a day left the secretariat for some place in Europe, and this required the elaboration of a considerable infrastructure.
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Only a tiny proportion of this correspondence was carried by the Pope's own messengers. The papal couriers were persons of dignity and privileged members of his household. During the fourteenth century there were generally about forty. But they could not all be on the road. Carrying despatches was only one of their responsibilities; they also played a considerable role in provisioning the papal household, negotiating in the markets roundabout. In any case to send all correspondence by courier would have been enormously expensive. The papal secretariat made every effort to minimise expense, sending letters with returning emissaries or other travellers leaving Avignon in the right direction. As in Rome, emissaries from other church or lay potentates could be kept waiting many months for a despatch, and then leave with a considerable bundle of letters to be sent on to other recipients. Letters could also be sent out with papal agents departing to collect revenues, or with bishops and abbots visiting their charges. These, though, were opportunities that would arise only exceptionally. For the largest volume of routine correspondence the popes availed themselves of merchant couriers passing back and forth between Avignon, their Italian headquarters, and other branch offices dispersed around Europe. In the first half of the fourteenth century all the major Italian companies established permanent residencies in Avignon. The Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli were the Pope's principal bankers, and much of the correspondence concerned the raising of funds and servicing of debt. After the mid-century crisis of the Florentine financiers the papacy was forced to rely on firms who did not necessarily run their own couriers, or, indeed, on private professional services set up specifically to accommodate the needs of papal correspondence. Some of these freelance operators, like Piero di Gieri, ran a business of considerable size, in his case combining his activities as a hotelier in Avignon with an on-demand courier service. This gave Piero wide-ranging influence; as a sort of unofficial postmaster from 1355 he accumulated both wealth and benefices.
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In the variety of mechanisms it could call upon to receive and despatch the news the papacy was not unlike a royal court, though with the added facility of a large infrastructure of volunteer informants and messengers spread throughout the Western Church. Even so, the maintenance of such a
sophisticated information network, particularly in such troubled times for the Church, put a considerable strain on its finances. The need to save money often led to delays; routine correspondence for a destination such as Rome or Venice would be accumulated until enough letters were ready to fill the messenger's bag, and this might take several weeks.
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Economy and efficiency were in constant tension in the medieval news networks.

Beloved Parents

Another group who established their own postal service were a less distinguished part of Europe's clerical class: university students. Universities were church communities of a very particular type. They were dedicated, as were monasteries, to training young men for the service of God. But theirs was a far more transient population. They brought together groups of young men who stayed for a relatively short time. Although life in the medieval university was very austere, students were not subject to the strict discipline of monastic life.

The largest universities drew their students from all over Europe. These young men, far from home, were often homesick, and the universities developed a sophisticated letter service to allow them to keep in touch with their families. The first documented case of a university postal service is that of Bologna, established by 1158; such a service was a common feature of almost all universities by the fifteenth century. The university of Salamanca in Spain employed fifteen muleteers for its messengers; Bourges, in France, had six couriers from the date of its foundation. The best -documented example is that of the university of Paris.
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Founded in around 1300, its messengers were appointed by the different student ‘nations’ to serve their locality.
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The longer journeys were made once or twice a year, shorter routes were covered more frequently. The university messengers were privileged individuals, exempted from a variety of taxes and duties. The positions were very much sought after, and became more lucrative when, from the fourteenth century onwards, the couriers began to carry letters also for other customers. This private postal service was remarkably enduring. Jean de Ravillac, the man who in 1610 would murder King Henry IV of France, was one of the
petits messagiers
of the university: he made his living carrying letters for a consortium of eighty students.

The examples that survive of student correspondence are undoubtedly only a tiny proportion of the anxious communications that shuttled back and forth between the universities and home. But the letters are sufficiently numerous for us to hope to discover in them some informed commentary on current affairs. Universities were placed in some of Europe's most vibrant cities, close to the ebb and flow of political life. Yet for all this the harvest of insights and comment
on the great events of the day is decidedly meagre. Students writing home had two things uppermost in mind: to impress their parents with their progress in the art of letter writing, and to ask for cash.
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The medieval epistolary style was formal and highly structured, and students, often destined for a career as an official or a clerk, were keen to demonstrate their progress in mastering this art. If they happened to be less diligent in attending the classes of masters who taught these skills, there were copy-books and manuals with model letters to draw on as shortcuts.
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The formal salutations over, the writer cut to the chase: money had run out; it was hard for family back home to realise how expensive a university could be; send more. This letter from Oxford University written around 1220 could stand for thousands in a similar vein:

Few parents found it easy to resist the pleas of a starving child even if the protestations of ceaseless industry were treated with healthy scepticism. ‘I have recently discovered,’ wrote one exasperated parent from Besançon to his son at Orléans,

This letter is interesting because it indicates parents were not solely dependent on their own children for knowledge of what was going on: other locals travelling back and forth would bring news. Students would describe their living quarters, their (reassuringly respectable) housemates, and the hazards of travel to their place of study. But they seem not much interested in the great events swirling around them. Private correspondence, as we will see, is frequently
disappointing in this respect.
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What these letters do offer is access to a remarkable network of communications radiating out from many of Europe's largest urban centres, a network licensed, and to some extent regulated, but operating independent of the apparatus of state.

The King's Command

The Church could rely on willing and trustworthy messengers travelling between communities or on pilgrimage. The universities identified sufficient demand to establish a regular paid messenger service. But only Europe's rulers could dispose of the resources, and authority, to establish something approaching the Roman system of relay couriers. Even so this became possible only towards the very end of the Middle Ages. Until then, a formal system of news-gathering proved beyond the capacity of most medieval states. For the most part princes concentrated on establishing the mechanisms to convey their wishes to their own subjects. Keeping abreast of events abroad relied on more ad hoc arrangements.

The volume of business generated by state administration in the medieval period is extremely impressive. The Exchequer or financial administration of King Henry I of England logged over four thousand despatches during his lengthy reign from 1100 to 1135.
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The deposited record could have been even more impressive had not the English Exchequer made use of wooden tally sticks to record tax receipts. Unlike the strips from Vindolanda, these were all consumed by fire in the nineteenth century. The Italian city states, which were among the first to adopt paper for their bookkeeping, chose what proved to be the more durable medium. For their part the English kings devoted particular attention to making their wishes known in the different parts of the kingdom. Messages, writs, summonses and notification of new laws were disseminated by mounted messengers. Each was responsible for four counties. By the fourteenth century the county sheriff could expect to receive several thousand writs a year.
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Every writ required action to be taken, as the king's will was thereby advertised. Collectively they made a material contribution to building a sense of a national, as well as a local, community.

At this point the nation states of western Europe were devoting far greater resources to enforcing authority within their own domains than to news gathering. This was an understandable priority, given that establishing authority over a dispersed land mass created its own logistical challenge. In southern Europe the situation was rather different. In Italy highly competitive, rich but volatile city states lived cheek by jowl. In these compact and well-organised communities it was far easier to communicate with the citizenry; but potentially
hostile neighbours were also close at hand. Having accurate information about the intentions and manoeuvres of rival states was absolutely critical to survival. In the Mediterranean region as a whole, vulnerability to the consequences of political events in the Levant and Middle East, as well as competition for territory, made the need for reliable intelligence a high priority. We know from the letter-books of King Jayme II of Aragon (1291–1327) that he cultivated an extensive network of informers in Italy and elsewhere. His surviving letter-books record an impressive fifteen thousand items of incoming intelligence.
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The king received information from a wide variety of correspondents, including Cristiano Spinola, a merchant who had inherited a connection with the Crown of Aragon from his father. Between 1300 and his death in 1326, Cristiano wrote King Jayme almost thirty letters from his native Genoa, and, while on his travels, from Avignon and elsewhere. The king rewarded him with trade concessions and royal protection. The Spinola company factors in Sicily were another reliable source. Cristiano relayed information largely without comment; he offered the king no advice on what action should be taken.