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Breaking news! How stories spread in early modern Europe
00:37:45
Joad Raymond Wren looks at how news was shared across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, uncovering a complex network of communication
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Three month plan $15 per month equivalent required New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com for when you're tired of being distracted Liberties is there to be absorbed this journal of politics and culture publishes essays that linger in your mind long after you finish reading. It's for readers who want more than clickbait or breaking news, for people who value thought over noise, from democratic erosion to the meaning of art, Liberties gives you writing that matters. Experience it for yourself@libertiesjournal.com welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. If you lived in 16th century London, would you have any idea what was happening in Paris, Venice or Frankfurt? Well, yes, according to Joad Raymond Wren, and that news might reach you quicker than you would expect. In this episode, I speak to Joad about his new book, the Great Exchange. It uncovers a complex network of communication that was operating across Europe between the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of modern mass media. And we touched on everything from ambassadors, news bulletins to emerging postal services. So why is this a particularly interesting period in the story of news?
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B
What happens at the beginning of this period is that we see the first soundings of the regular and effective spread of news across Europe and the beginning of an expectation that you might receive news next week. Previously, when news happened, you might hear it. But from around 1400 to 1500 we begin to see this expectation that there will be news, there will be more news. We can rely on there being more news. This week we see the first soundings of that around 1400, I think.
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C
So there's loads of fascinating stuff to get into here with how exactly news was spread, who was spreading it. But before we get into any of that, what are we actually talking about when we're talking about news in this period? What kind of subjects were deemed worthy of spreading across the continent?
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B
So if you look at newsletters, if they're exchanged among merchants, it'll be financial news, it'll be news of spices and trade and so on. But more generally, news of war, battles, court activity, royal entry, royal ceremonies, you'll see news of disasters, floods, plagues, earthquakes, that kind of thing. So I mean, the news that moves a big distance is news of that kind of complexion. And then of course, more locally, it's going to be complemented by more local news. It might be news of Parliament, it might be, you know, news of sensation and wonders. More locally, it'll be news of fish that have been caught with bits of the Bible in them and so on.
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C
That's interesting, the idea of sensation and wonder. So news wasn't solely to inform, it was also to entertain.
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B
I think news has always been to entertain as well as inform, though, of course. I mean, not to place a damper on the excitement of wondrous fish and strange births. They are of course, meaningful as well as entertaining. They tell you something about how God is feeling about your community. They're telling you something about the morality and the ethos of the place you live. I mean, I think it's quite important to add to that. I can reel off a list of the kinds of topics that we might read in a newsletter or in a printed newspaper, but that isn't what defines the news. What defines the news is a particular kind of communication. It's one person saying to another person, this is what happened. It doesn't matter whether it's recent, it doesn't really matter whether or not it's true. What matters is that exchange between these two people and the fact that they both understand that this is news, this is a kind of news communication. That's what makes the news not any particular kind of content. And when I say two people, of course, it might be some kind of the early modern equivalent of a journalist and the reader of a newspaper, but that's still a footing of exchange between two parties. And they both understand that this is news and that's what makes something news.
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C
I think there can be a popular preconception of the pre modern era of everybody kind of living in their own village, never going beyond it, knowing about the world beyond. But this kind of busts that myth a bit, doesn't it? Do we get a sense that the European populations were hungry for news and who was receiving that news?
- [05:42]
B
I think the complaints that there's too much news and that news is kind of a problem because the cobbler might be like reading his newspaper rather than fixing your shoes, begins around 1500. So I think there is a widespread perception that there is a lot of news and there is so much news that it's deleterious to trade and it's distracting and it's impossible to manage. Of course, our sources for the people having conversations about news are quite limited. But of course, if you look at court cases, you'll see evidence of people spreading news, but only if it creates some kind of problem within the community. There are diaries that provide. And we can see this from really early in the 15th century. We can see people are actively going around the streets of Venice gathering news and recording it in some kind of digested form in their diaries. There is evidence of an appetite for news that is quite sober and serious and earnest in terms of who's getting it. Again, the evidence is kind of tangential because of course, literacy in Europe at this period is very low and very uneven. But when news moves by the written word over a long distance, then we see signs of it being shared at barbershops, in marketplaces, later on in coffee houses. If you look at the metaphors for how news is described in this period, and again, it's striking that this is the case across Europe. News is presented as noisy. It's the buzz of news. It's very often the hum or buzz of news that we find in Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish and English.
- [07:26]
C
Let's talk a little bit about logistics then. So who are the people that are spreading this news that are circulating it?
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B
In the early part of this period, it's very much merchants. And I think we've kind of underestimated the interestingness of merchants and their importance in kind of creating European identities in this period. Merchants are one of the points of entry for news into a wider non mercantile community. The other important news gatherers are ambassadors. So from the late 15th century, we see the rise of the resident ambassador, which is a diplomat who's not just sent on a particular mission to achieve a particular agreement, but who will be living in the medium to long term in a community. And ambassadors gather local news and send it back to their home states. And in return, they are sent by their home states news that's been gathered from other resident ambassadors, because it's a useful medium of exchange. If you're a diplomat and you want to speak to other diplomats, if you want to make a presence at the court, news is a really, really useful commodity. So you've got these two kind of specialists who are. Have professional reasons for gathering news. But of course, not all of the news they gather is professional. They are founts for other kinds of news as well. And then from around the beginning of the 16th century, we see the appearance of they're not journalists yet, but they are gatherers of news who in a professional or a semi professional capacity, find out the news that's happening in the Senate or around Parliament or in Paul's Walk in St Paul's in London, write it down and send it out in a newsletter to a set of subscribers.
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C
And why would you say that they're not journalists yet?
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B
Well, because, I mean, they've got other jobs. This is not to say that they don't have a particular skill set, but because they do. But they're not what we think of as investigators who go out into the community and chase a particular story and interpret it and write it up in that way. What these people do is they gather. They gather. They will sometimes offer kind of interpretation warnings on the news and say, don't necessarily believe this, but generally speaking, what they do is gather and relay news in a really kind of neutral fashion. And if they're involved in the translation of news, they will translate it very literally. It's not their purpose to engage and transform the news to fit a particular vehicle of communication.
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C
So I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about the formats that you might receive news in in this period. So when did anything that we might recognize today as a newspaper first emerge?
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B
The first printed newspaper appears in 1605, but in fact, it looks like something else that's been circulating in manuscript for well over a century at this point. What we see in the 15th century is a set of practices about how you present news and you present news in paragraphs. And I'll come back to what a paragraph is and looks like. Later newsletters will incorporate paragraphs of News. And around 1500 we see, a little before 1500 we see the development of a particular kind of newsletter, which is called the aviso. And that word we see spreading right around Europe at the beginning of the 16th century. Avizi are collections of paragraphs of news. They're separate, discrete paragraphs of news. So they look like, to our modern eye, they look like individual News stories. Each paragraph contains an account of one event and is physically separated by some kind of heading or white space from the other news. So they look like modern news stories. Through the 16th century, Uvzi become a very well established genre. It will have the dates of the week in which it appears or is published, presented at the top. And it will have a list of news, often in the sequence in which the news was received. So the older news may well be before the more recent news. And then when a newspaper is printed in Strasbourg in 1605, it is simply a printed version of an aviso with a title page.
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C
So when you've got these avizi, how do you spread them across Europe? Can you tell us a bit about the logistics of that process?
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B
Another great invention of the early modern period that kind of explains how there can be so much news is the postal service. Now, there have been postal services of sorts for centuries at this point. I mean, Cyrus the Great has one running across his empire in the 6th century BCE. But in terms of modern Europe, the first postal service is established in Milan in around 1385 by the Duke of Milan. And he's probably being told about this by merchants who've seen similar things running in North Africa, which are themselves borrowed from Asia. So it's absolutely a kind of an import from the East. And between 1385 and again around 1500, various states say, okay, it would be very useful to have a regular system of spreading letters and communications using horses who can only ride a certain distance. Therefore, we need stages for the horses to be changed around Europe. These all then connect in the more influential cities in the period, and it becomes possible to send a letter from, you know, from Venice to Brussels, and then it joins a different postal service and moves on further. So we have an interconnected network of postal systems that means that letters can travel reliably really long distances. And these are then used both for spreading news items, but also for spreading news publications. So one of the great things that binds Europe into some kind of communicative entity in this period is the availability of relatively open postal services. In places where there aren't regular communications and postal services, you don't hear as much news from them. So anywhere sort of east of that line between Venice and Vienna and Krakow and gdask, anywhere east of there, there's news does come from there, but it's less frequent and it travels more slowly. So in a sense, the geography of Europe is constructed by the regular communications which are part affected by postal services. If you've shopped online, chances are you've bought from a business powered by Shopify. You know that purple shop pay button you see at checkout? The one that makes buying so incredibly easy? That's Shopify. And there's a reason so many businesses sell with it. Because Shopify makes it incredibly easy to start and run your business. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US. Sign up for your $1 per trial and start selling today at shopify.com promo go to shopify.com promo I'm Christian McCaffrey.
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B
There.
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C
I found this section on postal relays in your book super interesting and this idea that really postal relays were actually quite limited by the natural abilities of horses. So for many years you couldn't really improve the speed of a relay because it was limited by how fast a horse could go. How fast are we talking here? People would probably imagine that this is a really slow progress across Europe. Can you give us some examples maybe of how many days or it might take for news to spread between different places?
- [17:04]
B
Well, one of the things I try to do in the book is to try and digest all of those individual routes into some sort of broader picture. So I mean you can pick out astonishingly fast journeys. 1 NEWS will move from Venice to Rome in the same day, but they're highly atypical. And I think one of the things that's useful to do is to think about the speeds as kind of average speeds. So one of the things that they develop are post books where they write when they sent a letter and then it's recorded when they receive a letter. And so all of this information becomes kind of accessible and digestible for the modern Historian. So we know from evidence of post books, but also from individual stories how fast a horse is going to ride along a particular road. And I mean, the answer is it's between 13 and 16 kilometers an hour. I find this mind boggling. It's. This is more or less true. From Cyrus the great in the 6th century BCE to the pony express in America in the early 19th century, that is how fast a horse works. And a horse will do this for between about 16 and 25 kilometers, and then they get tired and their spleen begins to overheat. So we know that's the speed at which a piece of news can move. And that's not going to change until you get the railway and the electrical telegraph in practice, because you have to stop the horse and change horses. Because once a piece of post arrives in a particular town, it then needs to move to its recipient. And if it's going to be written up again, that of course takes time. So if you trace the speed of individual news stories as they move around Europe, in reality, most stories travel at between about one and a half kilometers an hour and just under five. And then there are some wild outliers that travel much faster than that. But basically news moves around Europe in this period between one and a half and just under 5 kilometers an hour. Now, I don't know whether that's fast or not. Does that sound fast to you?
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C
So have you got any examples of legs between cities that might kind of illuminate that for us? So, for example, London to Paris or whatever it may be.
- [19:28]
B
The postmaster Francesco Tasso set some targets for sending posts from Brussels in 1517. And he's told that in the summer, because obviously the seasons do affect the speed at which news travels, that he would be expected to get post to Paris in 36 hours, which is a speed of actually 7.2 kilometers an hour. And I think the reality is they might may well not have met that. And of course, once that post has reached Paris, it then takes time to be disseminated, which again decreases the speed. Rome, he was required to get the news there in 252 hours, which is actually a more realistic speed of about 4.8 kilometers an hour. But those are the ideals that he's instructed to meet. If you look at the speed of news arriving in Paris in the later, well, the middle of the 17th century. So 130, 140 years after the Tasso's target delivery times, News takes about three days to get from Rouen to Paris. It takes seven days to get from Brussels, I think it's 10 days from London. All of which fall into that same range of about 2, 2 and a half kilometers an hour. And again, if you look at the news arriving in London around the same time, middle of the 17th century, it's taking 11 days to come from Paris and be printed. So it's more or less the same 14 days from Frankfurt, Venice, 28 days. And of course, at this time, the news isn't moving at a constant speed. There are points at which the news will arrive, say, in Calais, and then have to wait for the boat or wait for the next packet boat post and so on. So what we're looking at is a composite of different kinds of travel and different kinds of travel time. But what that does mean, I think, is that's fast enough for readers and for listeners to develop a set of expectations about hearing news. I haven't heard any news from Paris for a week. I wonder what's happening there. Or a week ago, I heard news of the Fronde. Why haven't I had an update on this? So one of the things that really changes, I think, in this period is that because there is a regular supply and because there's, you know, it's relatively predictable that more news will come and it will come in a timely fashion, that a set of expectations develop and that, you know, you will live in an environment in which you expect to know what's happening on the other side of Europe there.
- [22:14]
C
We have some obvious challenges of getting this news across Europe. You know, we have the limitations of horses, bad weather, waiting for different ships. But another challenge I wanted to ask you about was translation. So if we've got these newsletters traveling between different countries, who's doing the translation and when?
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B
Translators are, I mean, for the most part, amateurs in this period, I mean, which is to say they have other kinds of jobs. A lot of merchants develop functional language skills. And there are a handful of kind of professional literary translators operating in the major cities of Europe. But I think a lot of people who are translating, and often we don't know their names or we know only their name and little else about them, are kind of jobbing translators. They're people who are really talented at gisting. I had a light bulb moment many, many years ago in the early days of writing this book, when I was having conversation with a French colleague and my French hit a wall, his English hit a wall. And we ended up having a conversation in which I was speaking English and he was speaking French, and we understood each other. Just about, and had to double check certain things. But it was a light bulb moment in which I thought this is exactly what was happening in early modern Europe in the. In the exchanges in the Bourse. People are gisting and double checking with the people with whom they're communicating. There are lots of language textbooks being published in this period as well. The genre sort of begins in the middle of the 16th century and is very well established in the middle of the 17th century. So I think translation happens precisely because we have a spectrum of people, some of whom who can kind of just about get by in another language, and those who are wonderfully informed and clever literary translators. And there are various people in the middle who are doing a lot of the grunt work. One of the things that's on their side is that there is, and we've not talked about state control of the news at all because there's a lot of anxiety about the free spread of news. But one of the anxieties in this period that's quite widespread is that people take news stories and change them in some way. So there is an expectation that when you translate, you will translate literally. We see people being thrown into prison for fiddling with translations, short prison sentences at least. But the expectation is that you will kind of do it word for word. Well, that does mean, is that a news paragraph will move from a Catholic state to a Protestant town, and it will stay the same. It's not going to get redacted or heavily edited in order to fit the religious context, the confessional context, or the political context in which it arrives. And again, that's kind of interesting. It means that you're reading the same news in Venice, Brussels, London and Frankfurt.
- [25:27]
C
That is really interesting because I really wanted to ask you about this idea of fake news. You know, obviously this is a massive concern of our own time, but you're suggesting that people could place a fair amount of trust then in the news that they were receiving in this period.
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B
Well, I'm sure there was a lot of false news in this period, and I think fake news might be slightly different. Let me try and describe what trust looks like in this period. I guess one, news spreads in paragraphs. The headings on the paragraphs, not headlines. The heading of the paragraph will be something like. So imagine you're reading this on the 7th of November in London. You read a paragraph that says something like, by letters From Rome dated 29 October, we hear news that there was on the first of the same month a battle at Ragusa. Or you might find a paragraph that says, from Venice, 6 February, we hear that they have news from Constantinople. And this is a habit, this is a habit of preserving that information about dates and place in the paragraph of news. And when that paragraph's copied or printed, that's kept or it's even added to. So if you copied out that paragraph, you would say, oh, I read in a newspaper on the 17th of March that. So what we're looking at is the preservation of what we think of as metadata.
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C
It's citing your sources.
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B
Absolutely, but right up front. And that's one of the ways in which you know how to trust the news, because you know where it's come from and you know how long it's taken. And so you'll often see people writing or copying out news, saying, well, I heard this from Vienna, but I heard this two weeks ago and there's been no update and therefore I'm not sure if it's true. Or you might see somebody at Venice reading a piece of news and it will be very recent and it will have come from Cyprus and they'll say, well, I'm not sure about it, because the sea route is much less reliable and we've not heard anything from the overland route via Ioannina, which is usually much more reliable. So what we see is a kind of skepticism that's based on time and space and that feels like the opposite of the world in which we live in. Which very often, if you're engaging with news through social media, it takes away all of that context. So it's not that there is not false news out there or untrue news out there, or unreliable news out there, and news spread by rumor and driven by anxiety. But the readers of the news, tutored I think often by news writers, are quite keen to think about the probability of its truth and conferring with multiple reports.
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C
How did this collaborative system of spreading news that you've described so well today come to an end to be replaced by modern news agencies?
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B
A number of things converge, I guess around 1800, very, very approximately 1800. This coincides with a set of technological changes in printing. The development of paper made of wood pulp. One of the things that characterizes the pre 1800 period is a shortage of paper, because paper is made of linen rags. But with the rise of wood pulp paper, suddenly paper becomes much cheaper. Unfortunately, it also becomes rubbish. So 19th century newspapers decay much more quickly than 18th century newspapers. There's the rise of steam powered printing and therefore one of the consequences of this is that the printing of newspapers becomes concentrated in the hands of people who can afford this kind of machinery, and they begin to dominate the news market. So with the erasure, in a way, of the kind of the cottage industry of production and dissemination of news, and this vast spontaneous network that covered and to some extent held a mirror up to Europe in the earlier period, we see the kind of the decline of this spontaneous network, which is non commercial, and the rise of commercial ways of communicating the news. The news agencies are essentially performing the task that had been performed on a much smaller, more collaborative scale prior to that point. And I don't wish to cast a slur on the 19th century, but we do see a reduction in the quality of the physical quality of the newspaper with the mass production of newspapers, but also a centralization of the production of newspapers into fewer hands, which means a reduction in the kinds of diversity of the approaches taken to gathering and communicating news. And something peculiar happens around the middle of the 19th century, which is that newspapers become seen as a kind of national concern. And what we see again across Europe is a kind of attempt to say, well, our newspapers reflect who we are. Which means that the history of news becomes the history of newspapers, and the history of newspapers becomes the history of nations. But I think one of the things that's wonderful and interesting and colorful about the earlier period is actually the kinds of communities that are constructed by sharing news, by the act of communicating news. They're both smaller, but also pan European. And I think there is a sense in which the sharing of news of Europe afforded people a sense that they were European. Even in an era, of course, great international wars, there is a sense that there is a shared community here. So one of the things that I guess I try to do in the book is to think about the big network that crosses Europe. Really, that's a kind of macro analysis. But I think really one of the ambitions of the book is to connect that meta analysis with the kind of the micro analysis of how that looks to an individual person. Because you can be part of a grand network and not necessarily see it. What you're seeing is you're at the barbers and he's handed you an aviso and you read it, or you get the person next to you to read it, and then you have a discussion about what's happening in the United Duchies of Cleve Julik. And for you, that's just you speaking to Giovanni the barber and Marco your neighbor. But actually that only happens because of the giant network, but also the giant Network only exists because there are hundreds of thousands of people having similar kinds of experiences. And it's the connection between those two things that I think is really interesting and quite difficult to get your head round.
- [32:51]
C
And finally, Jode, we touched on this a bit in our discussion of fake or false news. But are there any parallels that you'd highlight between this era of news and today, or perhaps any lessons that we could take from this era of news?
- [33:06]
B
Well, I think one of the things that social media can do well is provide a kind of digest. I think social media can do an extraordinary job at sort of filtering and digesting and summarizing stories. And often those stories can be produced by smaller producers, as it were, consumer producers who provide the opportunity for much more diversity in the news. But at the same time, that is of course a peril in that we end up, but as has been widely documented, living in a kind of in a bubble in which algorithms determine the news that we hear, or we only hear stories from our friends who are like minded and don't engage with things that we might find difficult and challenging. That seems to me a characteristic of the modern world that in some ways echoes and then moves away from what happened in the early modern period. Because the news paragraph of early modern Europe existed as a kind of network. And by a network I mean a very, very large number of different things that are connected in a system that are well connected to each other, but they're not organized through a specific design, but through the complementary and collaborative activity of the agents in between. So when paragraphs are shared, when news is shared, there is not a single overarching system, but what there is is a network of communication. And that network works precisely as modern networks do, because there are a number of places or people who are very well connected and they help connect people who are less well connected. Now, to some extent, the early days of social media are a bit like that. And that has clearly gone the other way in 2025. The lesson that we might learn. It strikes me that in the early modern period, the interest in time and space and communication geographies and that responsibility in preserving the metadata in the paragraph of news, combined with the sense that news isn't always necessarily complete and finished and polished and ready in the way that when I listen to the, the radio in the morning and I'm told that a politician is going to make a speech later that afternoon and this is what it's going to say, that's not what I want to hear. I want to hear the news that's happened, not the news that's about to happen. I want to hear the details and be able to piece it together myself. And I think that's one of the things that happened in the early modern period, the sense that news wasn't complete. This is not the inference that you're supposed to be drawing yet because you're to supposed you are expecting an update, you are expecting more news next week. And the news that you hear next week will help you understand the news this week. So news is an ongoing unfolding process. And I think somehow that kind of sense that we don't already know the significance of what has happened or is about to happen, combined with the responsibility in preserving the origins and the source and the movement of the story is something that we could learn from the early modern period.
- [36:32]
C
That was the writer Jode Raymond Wren speaking to me, Ellie Cawthorn. Joad's book on this subject is called the Great Making the News in Early Modern Europe.
- [36:54]
B
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