The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

by Andrew Pettegree

  8.2 The postal service between Paris and Antwerp, five times a month in both directions. This was a vital lateral route, connecting two major news hubs and through them the Low Countries and provincial France.

  All this was not achieved without a certain amount of bad blood. Having invested in their own regular courier services, the German cities did not take lightly to their prohibition. An arrest of city couriers on the road between Frankfurt and Cologne led to a collective protest to the Emperor.30 But the imperial post had one critical advantage. The new imperial routes were set up with the same sequence of relays as the main imperial line. The city courier services, in contrast, had no intermediary stages for changes of horses: the couriers rode the whole length of the route. In direct competition the imperial service could often deliver the mail on the longer journeys in half the time. As tempers cooled, the German city councils recognised the benefits of the imperial system and the independent German courier services gradually withered away.

  By 1620, at the conclusion of these developments, the German Empire had been provided with a postal system of unparalleled efficiency and sophistication. The single arterial route between Brussels and Vienna had been replaced by an intricate network of services centred on Germany's new postal capital, Frankfurt. Taken together with simultaneous renovations in the English and French systems, the revitalised imperial post made possible a new era in the history of communication.

  The new imperial postal network reached its completion just as the long period of peace enjoyed by Germany since 1555 was about to come to an end. In 1618, two years after the announcement of the new Frankfurt–Leipzig line, the Defenestration of Prague began the tragic sequence of events that made Germany the new battlefield of international politics. The Thirty Years War brought death and destruction to large areas of Germany, as foreign and mercenary armies criss-crossed the Continent. The conflict caused terrible damage to the Germany economy, and ended for ever German supremacy in parts of the European book trade. But one perverse consequence was to give new impetus to the development of an effective international postal network. The involvement of so many foreign powers in the German conflict meant that all Europe's capitals felt the need for swift, reliable information. Several took steps to improve their own internal communications, and to link these systems to the central European postal network. In France the royal postal monopoly was strengthened, and the network of postal stations expanded in 1622 to take in the southern cities of Bordeaux and Toulouse, and also Dijon, close to the potential battlefields in the east. In this same year Lamoral von Taxis established a courier service between Antwerp and London. This was followed, a decade later, by a treaty between the Brussels postmaster and the English postmaster general.31

  Danish and Swedish interests in Germany also stimulated an improvement in the information network.32 In 1624 Christian IV of Denmark set up his own postal system, based on Copenhagen, with a branch office in Hamburg. Four years later the Swedes extended this network with their own connection between Hamburg and Helsingör. The Swedish invasion of Germany in 1630 briefly resulted in the creation of an alternative postal network centred on Frankfurt, with 9 routes and 122 posts.33 While this soon collapsed after the Swedish defeat at Nördlingen in 1634, a more enduringly significant development was the establishment of a direct route between Paris and Vienna, via Strasbourg, finally cutting out the long diversion through Brussels that had so limited French access to the international post.

  8.3 The profits of a postal monopoly. Part of a series of four prints commemorating a visit by the Imperial Postmaster-General, the Count Thurn and Taxis, to the Postmaster of the Netherlands. The size of the retinue is impressive.

  With this development, the European postal network was fundamentally complete. The only further innovation that would be introduced, really until the coming of the railways and the penny post, was the substitution of a coach service in place of the postal riders.34 The postal coaches increased the volume of mail that could be carried, and created the possibility for travellers to avail themselves of the service. In the sixteenth century merchants and messengers who had ridden post had to be able to ride at the speed of the postal riders. This was an expensive service and only men who rode well could consider it. The postal coaches were a different matter; from the mid-seventeenth century, when coaches started to appear on short stretches of the German roads, a far wider cross section of travellers could avail themselves of the opportunity to travel in comfort. No longer did a traveller have to furnish their own wagon, ensure that the horses were strong and sound, and check that the driver was equipped to make what repairs were necessary on the journey: all that would be taken care of. Regular timetables meant that travellers could plan a journey with the reasonable assurance of timely arrival. The extra carrying capacity was especially important for the distribution of bulky mail items, such as newspapers. Within a few decades of their establishment the mail coaches came to bear the major burden of the timely distribution of printed news.

  The developments we have witnessed in this chapter represent a remarkable advance in European communications. The previous centuries had seen slow incremental changes in the rates of travel, accompanied by an increase in the volume of correspondence between those with sufficient funds to create their own network of communications. The best news was available only to those who could make the considerable investment necessary for what were essentially private networks, official or commercial. The coming of print in the sixteenth century had brought with it a substantial transformation in the reader community, and ingenious innovation in printed news: though much of this news was not particularly fresh, or, indeed, time specific. All of this changed within two decades of fierce innovation at the turn of the seventeenth century. At their end all of Europe's major commercial centres were closely linked in a dense web of public postal services. News could now be passed along reliable channels, at modest cost, with far greater regularity. It is no surprise, therefore, that the next significant development in the commercial exploitation of this news should take place here, in the commercial hubs of Germany and northern Europe. This development, closely connected with the expansion of the postal service, was the birth of the newspapers.

  CHAPTER 9

  The First Newspapers

  IN the year 1605 a young book dealer named Johann Carolus appeared before the Strasbourg city council with an unusual request. Besides his bookselling Carolus had recently also developed a lucrative sideline, producing a weekly manuscript newsletter. By this date, as we have seen, the manuscript newsletter had become the cornerstone of the information market for Europe's elites. From its early days in Rome and Venice, the production of manuscript newsletters had now spread across Germany, and from Augsburg and Nuremberg to Brussels and Antwerp in the Low Countries. Strasbourg, situated close to the crucial Rhine crossing serving the imperial post service at Rheinhausen, was extremely well placed for such a venture. Carolus could be sure of a steady supply of news from the imperial postmaster and the constant passage of commercial traffic. And in a busy city like Strasbourg he would not have been short of customers.

  His enterprise clearly prospered; by 1605 Carolus was in the position to diversify further by buying a print shop. He now conceived a plan to mechanise his existing trade in manuscript newsletters by producing a printed version. In a neat echo of Gutenberg and the invention of print one hundred and fifty years before, this was a logical response to a situation where increasing demand was straining the capacity of existing technology to deliver adequate quantities. But the investment costs, not least in buying his printing press, had stretched Carolus's resources, so now he turned to the city council for help. He told them that he had already produced twelve issues of his printed newsletter. But he obviously feared that if it proved successful others would try to copy him and wipe out his profits. So he asked the council to grant him a privilege – that is, a monopoly – on the sale of printed newsletters.1 This was not unreasonable. Any entrepr
eneur who believed he had pioneered a new industrial or manufacturing process would seek protection against interlopers copying his innovation, and such privileges were common in the book world.2 Carolus had good reason to hope that members of the Strasbourg city council, who made up a large part of his client base, would be sympathetic.

  For an event of such momentous consequences Carolus's intentions were surprisingly modest. He merely sought a way to simplify a process that currently involved writing by hand an increasing number of copies, and thus to speed production. The output itself would not be essentially different: still the same sequence of bald news items familiar from his manuscript news service. But from this modest, rather tentative transaction emerged a new form of communication that would in due course transform the European news market: Carolus had invented the newspaper.

  The Rise of the North

  If Carolus did begin publishing his newspaper, the Strasbourg Relation, in 1605, the earliest issues are unfortunately all lost: the first surviving copies date from 1609.3 For this reason many older histories of the newspaper will time its beginnings from this later date; it is only relatively recently that the full significance of the discovery in the Strasbourg archive of Carolus's petition to the city council has been appreciated.4 That four complete years of the earliest issues have simply disappeared is not at all surprising. It is very rare to find a complete run of the earliest newspapers, and many are known only from a handful of stray copies: sometimes only a single issue survives to attest to a newspaper's existence.5

  We can nevertheless be reasonably certain that Carolus did begin production in 1605. His petition to the council after all speaks of twelve issues already published. When we look at the first surviving copies from 1609, we see that these are certainly faithful to his stated intention that the newsprint would simply be a mechanised version of the handwritten newspaper. Individual issues have no title-heading: the title is given only in the printed title-page supplied to subscribers so that they could bind together the year's weekly issues. Instead the news begins, rather like the avvisi, at the top of the first page. In every respect the familiar pattern of the avvisi is retained: a sequence of news reports gathered by their place of origin and dated according to their date of despatch: ‘From Rome, 27 December'; ‘From Vienna, 31 December & 2 January'; ‘From Venice, 2 January’. The order reflects the sequence in which the posts from these various stations arrived in Strasbourg. The contents were almost exclusively the same dry political, military and diplomatic reports that had dominated the avvisi.

  In this respect the Strasbourg Relation set the tone for all the earliest German newspapers. Sticking closely to the model of the manuscript newsletter, the news-sheets adopted none of the features that made news pamphlets attractive to potential purchasers. There were no headlines and no illustrations. There was little exposition or explanation and none of the passionate advocacy or debate that characterised news pamphlets; indeed, there was little editorial comment of any sort. The newspapers also adopted none of the typographical features that helped pamphlet readers find their way through the text. There were no marginalia: in fact the only concession to legibility was an occasional line-break between reports. Although the news-sheets were soon being produced in very considerable numbers – a weekly edition of several hundred was not unusual – they made no allowances for the fact that new readers might not be so well versed in international political affairs as the narrow circle of courtiers and officials who had read the manuscript news-letters.6 If readers did not know who the Cardinal Pontini recently arrived in Ravenna was (or even the whereabouts of Ravenna), the newsletters made no effort to explain.

  For all that the new genre proved exceptionally popular. The Strasbourg Relation was joined in 1609 by a second German weekly, the Wolfenbüttel Aviso. This did introduce one notable innovation, a title-page, bearing a fine woodcut with a winged Mercury soaring over a landscape populated by busy news-bearers. This gave the Wolfenbüttel paper more of the appearance of a news pamphlet, but greatly reduced the space for news. Since the back of the title-page would also be blank, this left only six pages of an eight-page pamphlet for text. In the Wolfenbüttel case this was probably not crucial, since publication was almost certainly subsidised by the Duke of Wolfenbüttel-Braunschweig, a notable news addict. But this was less suitable for purely commercial ventures, which mostly followed the Strasbourg model of beginning the text immediately below the title-heading. All retained the quarto form familiar from the German news pamphlets and indeed the manuscript newsletters.

  The new genre of news publication spread through the German lands very quickly. A weekly paper was established in Basel in 1610, and shortly thereafter in Frankfurt, Berlin and Hamburg. The outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618 stimulated a new wave of weekly papers, and a dozen new titles were published after the Swedish invasion of 1630. In the following decade a number of established papers, responding to the quickening of interest in public affairs, began to publish more than one issue in a weekly cycle. Generally these papers appeared two or three times a week, though in 1650 the Leipzig Einkommende Zeitungen ventured an issue every weekday. Print runs also increased rapidly. In 1620 the Frankfurter Postzeitung was published in an edition of 450; the Hamburg Wochentliche Zeitung may have printed as many as 1,500 copies. This was exceptional; the average print run was probably in the region of 350 to 400.7 All told we can document the existence of around 200 titles published in Germany by the end of the seventeenth century: a total of some 70,000 surviving issues. Taking into account those that have been lost, this indicates a total output of around 70 million copies. With extraordinary rapidity a large proportion of the literate population of Germany would have had access to this new type of reading, particularly if we consider that these 200 newspapers were spread around eighty different places of publication. In the development of this new market the most significant steps were the establishment of newspapers in the two premier northern commercial centres of Frankfurt and Hamburg. The Frankfurter Postzeitung, founded in 1615, was the work of the remarkable Johann von den Birghden, the imperial postmaster.8 It was von den Birghden who had been responsible for extending the imperial post network into northern and eastern Germany, notably with the establishment of the crucial arterial route between Frankfurt and Hamburg. The newspaper was very much a by-product of this activity. Sadly von den Birghden did not bring to publishing the same conceptual genius and attention to detail that characterised his work with the post roads: his newspaper is as conventional and undistinguished as the other earliest papers. He was, however, the first to call attention to the close connection between the post and the news in the title of his paper. Its contemporary success and wide distribution can be attested by its survival in almost thirty separate libraries and archives.9

  The situation in Hamburg was rather different. This great commercial city in northern Germany was rather remote from the principal news arteries running along the imperial post route from Italy to the Low Countries. Necessarily the city had relied on its own messenger services, established since the medieval period, and by the sixteenth century a regular network of courier services connected the Hanseatic port with trading partners in the Baltic, the Low Countries and England. The founder of the first Hamburg newspaper, Johann Meyer, was heavily involved in the long-distance freight trade. Drawing on the connections developed from this business, Meyer had created a manuscript news service; rather like Carolus in Strasbourg, the establishment of his Wöchentliche Zeitung auss mehrerley örther was an attempt to mechanise this existing business. The potential for growth was, however, far greater in Hamburg, a great regional centre of trade and news, and Meyer's venture was very successful. The profits to be made soon sparked controversy with others in the Hamburg book world. In 1630 a consortium of booksellers and bookbinders challenged Meyer's right to sell the paper directly to his customers. After submissions from both sides the city council determined that Meyer could sell his paper retail for the first three
days of the week; thereafter it was to be made available to local booksellers in batches of one hundred for 9 pfennig per copy.10

  9.1 An early issue of the Frankfurter Postzeitung. The newspaper offers a good coverage of news from northern Europe, especially the Low Countries.

  Hamburg soon established a role as the supplier of news for the whole of northern Germany; other regional papers were essentially reprints of texts supplied from Hamburg, a fact explicitly acknowledged in the title of the first Rostock paper, the rather confusingly named Wöchentliche Newe Hambürger Zeitung.11 Hamburg was also the first city in Germany where the potential profits of newspaper publishing led to serious rivalry between competing papers. In 1630 Meyer faced not only complaints from the local booksellers but the emergence of a potentially serious challenge from a new imperial postmaster, Hans Jakob Kleinhaus. This was at the height of imperial military success in the Thirty Years War and in setting up his own paper, the Postzeitung, Kleinhaus seemed determined to put Meyer out of business.12 The dispute rumbled on until Meyer's death in 1634 when his paper was inherited by his redoubtable widow, Ilsabe. Her determination to maintain her livelihood found a sympathetic hearing with the city magistrates. In 1637 the council brokered a settlement. The postmaster's insistent claim to a monopoly of the press in Hamburg was refuted, but his exclusive use of the title Postzeitung was upheld. Still, Ilsabe was not yet finished. In this era it was common (and thoroughly inconvenient for students of the press) for proprietors to refresh the name of their papers quite frequently. If they moved to twice-weekly publication they would also often give the mid-week edition a separate title.13 Ilsabe Meyer took to shadowing the changing title of the imperial paper to blur the distinction between them. When the postmaster renamed his paper the Priviligierte Ordentliche Post Zeitung, hers became the Ordentliche Zeitung.