Caught between business, war and politics:late medieval roots of the early modern European news networks

Abstract

This essay challenges the notion that the early modern news-gathering practices and networks in Europe crystallized only in the late fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth century, corresponding with the emergence of permanent embassies and state-run postal systems. Inspired by an article published in 2005 by Georg Christ that for the first time problematized this notion, the author offers additional evidence conveyed in the experience of late medieval Venice and Florence, while relying on contemporary chronicles, merchant letters and diplomatic dispatches. Mainly through the analysis of three historical case studies, the essay argues that the existing networks of lower-tier diplomatic representatives, sea captains and military liaisons were already functioning as nodal points of an intelligence-gathering mechanism whose news reports usually ended up circulating in the public sphere. But, as further shown in this study, it was the merchant circles that decisively shaped such a news-gathering network by lending it its own matter-of-fact writing style, as well as allowing it to rely on its own scarsella system of couriers.