In Bruges
The northern axis of the great network of European trade was Bruges, the vibrant Flemish city that still retains much of its medieval charm. Bruges was the hub of the trade in wool and cloth. To this city came the finest English wool, from whence it was either shipped south or manufactured into the high-quality dyed Flemish cloths which commanded a high price in Italy, France and Germany. All the major Italian trading families of Genoa, Venice and Florence maintained offices in Bruges. Its great square provided space for the exchange of goods from all over Europe.
The fortunes of Bruges were assured with the arrival in 1277 of the first Genoese seaborne fleet.3 The groups of foreign traders who settled in the city were organised into separate nations, each with their own residential headquarters and charter of privileges. The Italians were particularly numerous. At a time when Italian overseas trade was dominated by the so-called super-companies, each was heavily represented in Bruges.4 Technically nothing could be sold in Bruges except through a licensed native broker. Although this stipulation was frequently evaded, brokerage fees yielded large gains for local men. Managing the enormous demand for monetary instruments was also lucrative. By the fourteenth century Bruges had become, in effect, a highly sophisticated service economy. It was also the largest money market in northern Europe.5
Communications played an essential role in oiling the wheels of trade. Though many of the bulk goods from southern Europe continued to be transported by sea, letters were sent overland. They travelled along the settled routes familiar to pilgrims and the first generation of international traders in the twelfth century. The roads from Bruges to Italy were recorded in handwritten itineraries which guided the traveller in carefully delineated stages between the largest towns. From Flanders the road went either east to Cologne and down the Rhine, or south to Paris, and thence, via the plains of Champagne, to the Alpine passes.6
The merchants and travellers who met on these routes would inevitably exchange news. Pilgrims could also sometimes be persuaded to carry letters with them on their way home. But the sheer volume of documentary traffic demanded something more settled and permanent. In 1260 the Italian merchants set up a formal courier service between Tuscany and Champagne, home at this time to the most important of the great medieval trade fairs. The rhythms and itineraries of trade were built around these fairs. Merchants were enticed to do business by the promise of a large international gathering. Cities competed for the valuable business by offering exemptions from customary dues and tolls in transit. The fairs of Champagne offered a fixed sequence of markets that lasted through most of the year from spring to autumn.7 They were the centre of a European network that spread out through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to embrace Geneva and Lyon to the south, St Denis north of Paris, and Frankfurt in Germany. Further afield lay Leipzig, Medina del Campo in Spain and Antwerp, the rising rival to Bruges in the Netherlands. Fairs provided the opportunity for face-to-face bargaining and the exchange of information. Much of this commercial and political news was never committed to paper. Merchants had to have a highly developed capacity to retain information on commodity prices, exchange rates, distances and commercial rivals. A good memory was a precious financial gift and one that was consciously trained and nurtured. The account book of Andrea Barbarigo of Venice records in 1431 a cash payment of 13 ducats to ‘Maistro Piero dela Memoria for teaching me memory’.8
In the fourteenth century the wealthier merchants travelled less. Although the fairs still attracted merchandise, much bulk commerce was now shipped by sea. This only increased the need for reliable intelligence. In 1357 seventeen Florentine companies banded together to create a shared courier service. The most important routes ran from Florence to Barcelona, and from Florence to Bruges. The Bruges service ran along two routes: one via Milan and then up the Rhine to Cologne; the other diverted from Milan via Paris. The rival scarzelle Genovesi ran services from Genoa to Bruges and from Genoa to Barcelona.9 In addition to the trans-continental routes, the Italian merchant communities established numerous shorter-distance services within the Italian Peninsula. A twice-weekly service ran between Venice and Lucca. The weekly post between Florence and Rome arrived in Rome on a Friday and set off back on Sunday. It was now only a short step to the establishment of commercial courier services, run on behalf of the merchant companies by independent entrepreneurs. The firm headed by Antonio di Bartolomeo del Vantaggio in the fifteenth century operated a whole network of routes, including a weekly service between Florence and Venice.
Couriers were expected to keep to strict timetables. In the 1420s couriers from Florence were expected to reach Rome in five or six days, Paris in twenty to twenty-two, Bruges in twenty-five and Seville, a journey of two thousand kilometres, in thirty-two days. The annotations on the letters exchanged between Andrea Barbarigo in Venice and correspondents in Bruges, London and Valencia suggest this timetable could generally be adhered to: only the Seville itinerary seems unfairly demanding.10 The most sustained evidence for the efficiency of the courier service around the year 1400 comes from the Datini archive. An examination of his correspondence, together with notes of arrival and despatch of letters in the account books, produces evidence of around 320,000 dated epistolary transactions. The seventeen thousand letters between Florence and Genoa and the seven thousand letters between Florence and Venice took between five and seven days to arrive. Delivery times to London were more variable, depending as they did on the vagaries of the Channel crossing. On the other hand the post between Venice and Constantinople was remarkably reliable: letters would arrive between thirty-four and forty-six days of despatch.11
2.1 The birth of a paper culture. Merchants and other writing professionals were forced to develop systems for filing incoming documents and correspondence.
Merchants were not the only users of these courier services. Notwithstanding the resources they poured into building their own postal networks, Europe's rulers were perfectly aware that the earliest and most reliable news often came through the merchant communities. With a fair wind news could travel remarkably quickly. The murder of Charles the Good in Bruges on 2 March 1127 was known in London two days later, thanks to the good offices of the Flemish merchants. When in 1316 a papal emissary arrived in England with news of the election of the new Pope, John XXII, he was graciously received and richly rewarded. But the king, Edward II, had in fact already heard this news, a month earlier, from Lawrence of Hibernia, the messenger of the Bardi of Florence.12 As late as 1497 the Milanese ambassador in London was recommending use of the courier service of the Florentine or Genoese merchants when speed was of the essence. Their confidentiality could also be relied upon.13
The merchants were often remarkably well informed. A long report compiled by the manager of the Medici office in Bruges in 1464 offered a detailed commentary on recent political events in both England and the Low Countries.14 A decade earlier he had correctly predicted that the loss of Rouen would spell the end for the English in Normandy. If one leaves aside the detail of business information (for the political manoeuvres obviously had implications for various ongoing transactions), then these letters have almost the character of diplomatic despatches. Certainly the long-established branch managers were seasoned observers of the local political scene, and often had better local connections than the foreign ambassadors who established residence in the sixteenth century. Diplomats, particularly if they arrived as representatives of a hostile power, struggled to establish relationships of trust.15 So they frequently turned for information, as did their hosts, to the ostensibly neutral foreign (usually Italian) merchants. This neutrality could become strained if the relationship between the merchants and the host power became too close. At one point the Medici manager in Bruges became personally involved in the secret negotiations surrounding a proposed continental marriage for Edward IV. During the Hundred Years War the Bardi and Peruzzi companies both received substantial payments from the English Crown for spying on French military
preparations in Normandy.16 The merchants were in demand because it was far easier for merchants – particularly merchants from the unaligned states of Italy – to move freely across national boundaries than it would have been for nationals of the belligerent states.17 This difficulty of travelling through hostile territory was one of the factors that made it more difficult to establish an efficient diplomatic courier service.18
The main purpose of merchant despatches was obviously to provide information for the merchants themselves. Given the business sensitivity of so much of the information they retail, the cost of maintaining these courier services seems modest. Jacopo and Bartolomeo di Carocio degli Alberti and partners spent around 30 florins annually on the post between 1348 and 1350. Datini's firm in Avignon spent between 20 and 40 florins a year, and his Florence office a remarkably modest 13 florins. This was about the same as might be paid to a relatively junior member of staff as an annual salary.19 As a proportion of annual outgoings it was probably well below what was expended on marine insurance. News too was insurance of a sort, and provided vital data on which to base business decisions. The difficulty was knowing what news to believe.
Lost in Transmission
The development of an international European business network had a transformative effect on access to news in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The roots of this development lay in the emergence of major Italian consortia trading to every part of Europe. Trading in a wide range of commodities and luxury goods, companies like the Bardi and Peruzzi established branches throughout the region: in Bruges and London, Spain and the Levant. This branch system created an organic communications network. Frequent contact was necessary to exercise control over branch managers and prevent them making decisions that were not in the company's interest. In return one of the ways the managers could demonstrate their competence was to provide a steady flow of informed comment: on the safety of routes, the movement of exchanges and future trading opportunities.
Exposure in so many markets was not without its dangers. In the 1340s the Peruzzi and the Bardi had experienced a spectacular bankruptcy, when the failure of the English Crown to repay substantial loans left the Italians fatally exposed to their own creditors. The Italians had been lured into underwriting Edward III's ambitious schemes in France by the prospect of a dominant role in the English wool trade. The Florentines were only the latest of a series of Italian consortia to find that lending to the English Crown was a high-risk enterprise. But as each company failed, there was always another to take its place. In 1395 the Mannini advanced large sums to underwrite the cost of Richard II's marriage to the French king Charles VI's daughter, Isabella of Valois. When four years later he was forced to abdicate, they shared in his downfall. ‘Because of the deed in England,’ reported an unsympathetic rival, ‘the said Mannini must needs give up their trade – and thus the world goes. Had there been no revolution in England, they might have become great, but no man ever allied himself with great lords, without losing his feathers.’20 Yet there was always someone ready to try. Almost as soon as the Italians had news of Richard's deposition, and of his death the following year, they were speculating whether the usurper Henry of Lancaster was likely to take on Richard's young widow, or another wife: ‘Whomsoever he may wed, there will be great feasting in England, and silken stuffs and jewels will go up in cost. Wherefore I would advise any who have fine jewels to send them here.’21
Here lay the paradox. Competition was natural and inevitable in the business world if fortunes were to be made. But cooperation in the sharing of information was also a necessity, when so much was uncertain and intelligence so hard to come by. Despite the impressive number of business letters that have come down to us, it is important to remember that they represent only a small fraction of what was written. The letters themselves express frequent anxieties about the difficulties of communication, and the uncertainties of the road:
Andrea sends you greetings. And you ought to know that the Sienese people who are here have despatched their letters through a common messenger after the last fair of Saint Ayoul. And I send you a bundle of letters through Balza, a carrier from Siena. If you did not receive them, do try again to get them. The messenger of the merchant guild has not yet come. May God send him to us with good news, for he has already taken too long.22
Greetings from Beaulieu. As I have written to you by other letters, I am surprised that after you left us here, we received no letter except the one that you sent from Nice. And were it not that I definitely think the fault is not yours (it is the fault, I believe, of those to whom you entrusted the delivery) I should say that you have entirely forgotten us. I am not writing anything more about this, except that you should be careful to whom you entrust letters, so that they are delivered to us.23
Many would no doubt sympathise with the despairing lament of a merchant in Paris writing back to Italy:
It seems as if we had been waiting a thousand years for news from you, for information about what is happening down there; later we shall not be so uneasy, but for Heaven's sake write often!24
One strategy to ensure the post got through was to send duplicates. ‘The Letter was sent on by chance and by two hands, following two different roads, so that you will be fairly sure to receive it.’25 But this was expensive and cumbersome. Sifting through these letters brings home that many merchants did not make use of the formal courier services, either because they were not part of the consortia that ran them or because they could not afford them. Inevitably these business letters are part of a jigsaw with most of the pieces missing. We hear of transactions to be undertaken, but not how they turned out. And this points up one difference between business letters and the political news they contain. Political news provides context, describing events that have occurred and are likely to impact on trade. The business part of a letter is generally future-oriented, with plans, recommendations and instructions. It assumes knowledge of a context that does not need to be spelt out. The business letters are by and large intended to initiate action; the political comment to inform it.
Nevertheless, there were key similarities between the business discussion and the more general news included in these letters. The sharing of news was costly, and therefore precious. It relied on a network of friends and correspondents; it relied, most of all, on trust. Trust, and the trustworthiness of the person who offered the information, was a critical issue that would run through the history of news gathering for the next four centuries.
With so much at stake there were inevitably those who would attempt to steal a march on their competitors. ‘If you engage in trade, and your letters arrive together with others,’ wrote Paolo da Certaldo in a merchants’ handbook of the mid-fourteenth century,
always keep in mind to read yours first before passing on the others. And if your letters advise you to buy or sell some merchandise at a profit, call a broker immediately and do what the letters advise, and then consign the other letters that arrived with yours. But don't consign them before having finished your own business.26
There were even couriers prepared to accept retainers from particular merchants in return for delivering the mail pouch to their favoured clients first.27 That said, Paolo da Certaldo's well-known advice has probably received more attention than it deserves. His remarks on business ethics form part of a wry and cynical text which gives equally caustic advice on how Italian citizens should manage their spirited wives. His comments should be set against an equally strong tradition that commercially sensitive news should be freely shared; and much no doubt was, in the marketplace and in the taverns, when ships came in from far afield. In Emden, northwest Germany, where a new merchant community was established in the sixteenth century, the practice was that commercial letters from far-flung places were read aloud in the market square.28 This would undoubtedly have been a tradition based on earlier German precedent, and the free sharing of information in many ways made far more sense. News about faraway events was precious, but difficu
lt to verify. The quantity of rumour, travellers’ tales and eyewitness accounts available in the marketplace therefore played a crucial role in making sense of what might be received in confidential letters. It was valuable to be ahead of the crowd, to buy up grain before it shot up in price on report of an impending dearth. But to act on a report that turned out to be false, or exaggerated, could be more disastrous than not to have acted at all.
It was a delicate balance, and no one wanted to go out on a limb. It was all very well to be first with the news – but how did one know whether it was true? The hope was that the dense network of connections in the merchant community would bring corroborative reports. Those most daring did not wait. Rumour on the Rialto could move prices on the Venice commodity market several points in a single day. Unscrupulous traders were suspected of deliberately spreading false reports so they could profit from market movements.
2.2 Albrecht Dürer, The Little Courier. Speed was of the essence for Europe's messenger services, as is dramatically captured in this woodcut.
So despite all the hazards, merchants were assiduous collectors of rumour. ‘Keep me informed,’ wrote Francesco Datini to a correspondent in Genoa in 1392, ‘about spices and about everything related to our trade, especially all the rumours and all the news that you hear about the sea and other things. When you see anything that involves importing or exporting merchandise, let me know.’29 Of course an unlucky or credulous choice could damage a reputation as well as ruin a speculation. In 1419 the Venetian diarist Antonio Morosini devoted some considerable time to compiling a long despatch of news for his nephew Biagio Dolfin, the Venetian consul in Alexandria. Morosini would have been less than pleased had he known that another nephew, Alban, had written to warn Biagio not to trust what he read:
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself Page 6