Venice as an Information Centre in Early Modern Europe

The fifteenth century saw the revolution of printing and publishing. Rapidly, Renaissance Europe became obsessed with news that arrived from all corners of the globe and fed avaricious curiosity about momentous events, such as the impending Ottoman advance towards European terrains, the naval expeditions to the New World, the developments of the Reformation and CounterReformation, and the prices of spices and all the other advances of rapidly evolving early modern economies.

Venice as an Information Centre in Early Modern Europe

 Venice’s strategic geographic position midway between the Ottoman Levant and Habsburg Spain placed her at the crossroads of information networks and, in consequence, at the forefront of the advancement and sophistication of news. Gradually, Saint Mark’s protégée became one of the most significant agencies of news in the early modern world.

So, when Solanio opened the third scene of The Merchant of Venice with the line ‘Now, what news on the Rialto?’ his contemporary Venetians were well aware of the economic and political weight of this question. William Shakespeare’s deployment of the fabled Venetian landmark is not fortuitous, as the Rialto market was the economic and commercial hub of Venice.

News of the impact of harvests, wars, epidemics, and shipwrecks reaching the Venetian market affected the price of foodstuffs, which, in turn, determined public debt investment, maritime insurance premiums, and foreign currency.

The news of the Portuguese’s new spice route to India through the Cape of Good Hope in 1501, for instance, sky-rocketed the price of spices such as pepper, ginger, and cloves in Venice within four days.

Reports of the seizure of Venetian galleys by the Turkish admiral and corsair Kemal Reis in the same year caused maritime insurance rates to shoot up from 1.5 to 10 per cent. So, for Venetians of all ranks who were either producing or trading in commodities, news meant profit or loss. 

With the passing of time, while news was turning into a craze in Europe, in Renaissance Venice it was becoming business as usual. This is because already from medieval times, the Venetian government’s avid protectionism of commerce had spawned a deeply rooted international network of merchants, brokers, and agents.

Recognizing the vitality of the systematic diffusion of information for commercial advancement and prosperity, as early as the thirteenth century, the Venetians had developed a postal system that served the epistolary needs of the Republic. This service branched out into two distinct provisions, one for diplomatic purposes and one exclusively for mercantile matters, even though it is not clear whether Venetian merchants made use of the official Venetian couriers for their private affairs.

Eventually, by the 1290s, the distinct functions of the Venetian postal system were merged into one service administered by nine officials. While this service was initially rudimentary in nature, by 1489 the Venetian couriers had organized themselves into the Compagnia dei Corrieri Veneti, which, by the sixteenth century, provided the main reliable postal service between Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

Roving merchants were amongst the customary newsdealers in Venice, and frequently agreed to deliver letters, at times in secret. It has even been argued that Venetian merchants, due to their social standing, were occasionally deemed more trustworthy for the transportation of important governmental letters than official couriers.

As seasoned travellers and correspondents, Venetian merchants turned into skilled reporters for the Republic, and their letters produced a kind of pre-modern ‘data bank’. Their written reportage was taken into serious consideration not only by the locals, but also by foreign diplomats, who, in turn, communicated it to their superiors.

So important was their coverage that in a letter to Charles V the imperial ambassador in Venice reiterated that no news about the Turks had arrived from Venetian merchants in Constantinople, the city that housed an established colony of Venetian traders with a permanent formal representative, the bailo. The systematic correspondence between the Venetian authorities and the bailo was spiced with information of political and economic weight.

Incessantly reporting on the crucial Ottoman-Venetian relations, this communication never went unnoticed or unsuspected by the Turks, and rightly so. In 1492 for instance, the bailo Girolamo Marcello was expelled from Constantinople, accused of spying. Indeed, according to the senator Domenico Malipiero, he was. 

The fast-growing significance of information on the politico-economic conduct of the Venetian empire rendered intelligence of any nature a determining factor in the city’s commercial and territorial pre-eminence, so much so that the Venetians eventually turned intelligence into a commodity, a kind of ‘vernacular commerce’, as Richard Mackenney pertinently styled it.

More specifically, from the second half of the sixteenth century, a handwritten news-sheet started to circulate in Venice (as in other Italian cities), called gazeta dela novità. The gazeta dela novità was a small monthly news publication named after the gazzetta, the small copper coin disbursed to purchase it. It was, quite literally, a ‘halfpennyworth of news’.

 Yet its informational value was significantly higher, since through its pages Venetians could be apprised of economic, political, and social affairs as they were unravelling elsewhere on the European continent.