Abstract
In the sixteenth century, merchants used their skills and increased capital to gain greater political power than they previously experienced. The greatest of merchants became bankers for the princes of Europe, and some even rose to the ranks of the nobility. Direct access to political power was reserved for elite merchants participating in long-distance trade or banking activities, but interest in political news also spread to lower, more ordinary rungs of mercantile circles.
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Notes
Francesca Trivellato, “Merchant Letters across Geographical and Social Boundaries,” in Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, eds. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Recent literature on the collection of information and news in the early modern period includes Brendan Dooley, ed. The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010);
Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron, eds. The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2001);
Leos Müller and Ojala Jari, eds. Information Flows: New Approaches in the Historical Study of Business Information (Helsinki: SKS Finnish Literature Society, 2007). The implication of the development of skills for processing information cultivated by merchants has been shown for science by Harold Cook and for the early modern state by Jacob Soll.
Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007);
Jacob Soll, “Accounting for Government: Holland and the Rise of Political Economy in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40, no. 2 (2008): 215–38;
Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). However, these skills were not unique to merchants. Philip II constructed a robust information network in order to rule his vast empire.
Cristina Borreguero Beltrán, “Philip of Spain: The Spider’s Web of News and Information,” in The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010);
Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
At the time of Daniel’s death, he was the seventh wealthiest inhabitant of Leiden. R. C. J. van Maanen, “De vermogensopbouw van de Leidse bevolking in het laatste kwart van de zestiende eeuw,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 93, (1978): 1–42.
Luuc Kooijmans, Vriendschap: En de kunst van het overleven in de zeventiende en achtiende eeuw (Amsterdam: B. Bakker, 1997).
On the Dutch Revolt, see Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008);
Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995);
Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt, Revised ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1985).
Floris Prims, De Groote Cultuurstrijd, 2 vols. (Antwerp, Belgium: N. V. Standaard, 1942).
Gisela Jongbloet-van Houtte, “De belegering en de val van Antwerpen belicht vanuit een koopmans archief: Daniel van der Meulen, gedeputeerde van de Staten van Brabant ter Staten Generaal (1584–1585),” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 91 (1976): 23–43.
Violet Soen, “Reconquista and Reconciliation in the Dutch Revolt: The Campaign of Governor-General Alexander Farnese (1578–1592),” Journal of Early Modern History 16, no. 1 (2012): 1–22.
The scale and importance of emigration from the southern provinces has been well studied. Gustaaf Asaert, 1585: De val van Antwerpen en de uittocht van Vlamingen en Brabanders (Tielt, Belgium: Lannoo, 2004);
J. G. C. A. Briels, Zuid-Nederlandse Immigratie 1572–1630 (Haarlem, The Netherlands: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1978);
Wilfrid Brulez, “De diaspora der Antwerpse kooplui op het einde van de 16de eeuw,” Bijdragen voor de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 15 (1960): 279–306;
Oscar Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden en de opkomst van de Amsterdamse stapelmarkt (1578–1630) (Hilversum, The Netherlands: Verloren, 2000);
R. van Roosbroeck, Emigranten: Nederlandse vluchtelingen in Duitsland (1550–1600) (Leuven, Belgium: Davidsfonds, 1968);
Gustaaf Janssens, “‘Verjaagd uit Nederland’: Zuidnederlandse emigratie in de zestiende eeuw een historiografisch overzicht (ca. 1868–1994),” Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis 75, no. 1(1995): 102–19. The recent work of Geert Janssen has concentrated on the cultural aspect of exile.
Geert H. Janssen, “Exiles and the Politics of Reintegration in the Dutch Revolt,” History 94, no. 313 (2009): 36–52;
Geert H. Janssen, “Quo Vadis? Catholic Perceptions of Flight and the Revolt of the Low Countries, 1566–1609,” Renaissance Quarterly 64, no. 2(2011): 472–99;
Geert H. Janssen, “The Counter-Reformation of the Refugee: Exile and the Shaping of Catholic Militancy in the Dutch Revolt,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63, no. 4 (2012): 671–92.
Both Daniel and Andries eventually moved to the northern Low Countries. In 1591, Daniel traded his residence in Bremen for one in the university city of Leiden. Andries left Bremen only in 1607 to live in Utrecht. R. van Roosbroeck, “De Antwerpse van der Meulens in Bremen: Het begin van de ballingschap (1585–1586),” Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen 31 (1972): 194–216.
Marten della Faille was the brother of Daniel’s wife Hester della Faille. Daniel and Marten carried on a frequent and amicable correspondence despite Marten’s close ties with Spanish authorities (DvdM 274). Both Marten and Robert van Eeckeren, another of Daniel’s brothers-in-law, became almoners upon the return to power of the Spanish in 1585. Marten gained a position on the admiralty board of Archduke Albert in 1596. In 1614, he rose to the nobility, officially becoming Baron de Nevele. Yves Schmitz, Les della Faille: Les branches des barons de Nevele et d’Estienpuis, vol. 3 (Brussels: Impr. F. Van Buggenhoudt, 1967).
Brulez, “De diaspora der Antwerpse kooplui”; Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden; Clé Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange: Merchants, Commercial Expansion and Change in the Spatial Economy of the Low Countries, c.1550–1630 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006);
Herman van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy (Fourteenth–Sixteenth Centuries), 3 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963);
Jeroen Puttevils, “Klein gewin brengt rijkdom in: De Zuid-Nederlandse handelaars in de export naar Italie in de jaren 1540,” Tijdschrift voor sociale en economische geschiedenis 6, no. 1 (2009): 26–52.
An introduction to the trade of the Van der Meulens is provided in Jongbloet van Houtte, “Inleiding.” The related trade of Marten della Faille is meticulously studied in Wilfrid Brulez, De Firma Della Faille en de internationale handel van Vlaamse firma’s in de 16e eeuw (Brussels: Paleis der Academièen, 1959).
Shipping was especially vulnerable to confiscation. Merchants from the rebellious provinces used various means of deception to get their goods to Spain and beyond. They hired ships or shippers from neutral territory such as Emden or Hamburg. Even if neither ship nor captain hailed from neutral territory, merchants attempted to procure documents stating that they were. Lacking this, such documents were forged. Ships also carried passes of free conduct, often from both sides. J. H. Kernkamp, De handel op den vijand 1572–1609, 2 vols. (Utrecht, The Netherlands: Kemink en zoon n.v., 1931).
For specifics on the trade of the Van der Meulens, see the articles in J. H. Kernkamp, ed. De handel van Daniel van der Meulen c.s., in het bijzonder rond de jaren 1588–1592: werkcollege economische geschiedenis (Leiden, The Netherlands: Universiteit Leiden, 1969).
Overviews of the archive are provided in Jongbloet-van Houtte, “Inleiding”; J. H. Kernkamp, “Het Van der Meulen-archief ca,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 85 (1970): 49–62.
Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80.
Wolfgang Behringer has emphasized the importance of advances in the postal system in the creation of a communications revolution. Wolfgang Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur: Reichspost und Kommunikationsrevolution in der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003);
Wolfgang Behringer, “Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept,” German History 24, no. 3 (2006): 333–74. Meanwhile, Brendan Dooley has concentrated on the notion of contemporaneity in the spread of information in the early modern period. Dooley and Baron, Politics of Information; Dooley, Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity.
See also P. O. Beale, Adrian Almond, and Mike Scott Archer, eds. The Corsini Letters (Stroud, UK: Amberley, 2011);
Seija-Riitta Laakso, “In Search of Information Flows: Postal Historical Methods in Historical Research,” in Information Flows: New Approaches in the Historical Study of Business Information, eds. Leos Müller and Ojala Jari (Helsinki: SKS Finnish Literature Society, 2007).
The classical study of the early modern postal system in the Netherlands is Jacobus Overvoorde, Geschiedenis van het Postwezen in Nederland voor 1795 (Leiden, The Netherlands: 1902).
For recent work on the postal system in Brabant, see Paul Arblaster, “Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers: England in a European System of Communications,” Media History 11, no. 1–2 (2005): 21–36;
Paul Arblaster, “Antwerp and Brussels as Inter-European Spaces in News Exchange,” in The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010).
On letters in the early modern period, see Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond, eds. Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, vol. 3, Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Paul D. McLean, The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
On merchant letters specifically, see Sebouh Aslanian, “‘The Salt in a Merchant’s Letter’: The Culture of Julfan Correspondence in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean,” Journal of World History 19, no. 2 (2008): 127–88; Trivellato, “Merchant Letters”;
Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Beale, Almond, and Archer, The Corsini Letters.
The letters of Carolus Clusius, a contemporary of Daniel who also lived in Leiden, were equally informal. Florike Egmond, “Correspondence and Natural History in the Sixteenth Century: Cultures of Exchange in the Circle of Carolus Clusius,” in Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, eds. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline van Gent, “Corresponding Affections: Emotional Exchange among Siblings in the Nassau Family,” Journal of Family History 34, no. 2 (2009): 143;
Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline van Gent, “In the Name of the Father: Conceptualizing Pater Familias in the Letters of William the Silent’s Children,” Renaissance Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2009): 1130–66; McLean, Art of the Network.
See the letters from Hans to Daniel in DvdM 622 and R. Andriessen and H. F. Cohen, “Op zoek naar een stapelmarkt: Onderzoekingen in het archief-Daniël van der Meulen,” in De handel van Daniel van der Meulen c.s., in het bijzonder rond de jaren 1588–1592: werkcollege economische geschiedenis, ed. J. H. Kernkamp (Leiden, The Netherlands: Universiteit Leiden, 1969).
A good example supplied by Brendan Dooley of the extent that writers were willing to go to provide correspondents with the best and most reliable news is that of the attempts of Don Giovanni de’ Medici to give account of the Spanish Armada and the siege of Ostende to the Florentine court. Brendan Dooley, “Making It Present,” in The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010).
Henk van Nierop sees the same phenomenon in rumor, or the spread of information by word of mouth. Henk van Nierop, “‘And Ye Shall Hear of Wars and Rumours of Wars’: Rumour and the Revolt of the Netherlands,” in Public Opinion and Changing Identities in the Early Modern Netherlands: Essays in Honour of Alastair Duke, eds. Judith Pollmann and Andrew Spicer (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007).
Behringer, “Communications Revolutions”; Mario Infelise, “From Merchants’ Letters to Handwritten Avvisi: Notes on the Origins of Public Information,” in Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, eds. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Johannes Weber, “Strassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in Europe,” German History 24, no. 3 (2006): 387–412; Arblaster, “Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers,” 29–33.
Weber, “Origins of the Newspaper in Europe”; Johannes Weber, “The Early German Newspaper: A Medium of Contemporaneity,” in The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010).
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989).
A bias toward printed information can be seen to differing degrees in works such as John J. McCusker, “The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (2005): 295–321;
Donald J. Harreld, “An Education in Commerce: Transmitting Business Information in Early Modern Europe,” in Information Flows: New Approaches in the Historical Study of Business Information, eds. Leos Müller and Ojala Jari (Helsinki: SKS Finnish Literature Society, 2007); Weber, “Origins of the Newspaper in Europe”; Dooley and Baron, Politics of Information. Literature focusing on the development of communication network, such as the articles in German History 24 (2006), introduced by Wolfgang Behringer, vacillates between narratives that stress the importance of transportation structures able to facilitate more rapid movement of information and people and those that place a greater emphasis on the ability of transportation networks to carry printed works such as newspapers. The latter often obscures the extent to which information in the form of correspondence, not to mention word of mouth, continued to proliferate.
An interesting discussion of the relationship between the concepts of the public sphere and the communications revolution is found in Andreas Gestrich, “The Public Sphere and the Habermas Debate,” German History 24, no. 3 (2006): 413–30.
The literature on all three of these modes of exchange is voluminous. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977);
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000);
Martha C. Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010);
Kettering, “Patronage and Kinship”; Sharon Kettering, “Friendship and Clientage in Early Modern France,” French History 6, no. 2 (1992): 139–58; McLean, Art of the Network;
Gustav Peebles, “The Anthropology of Credit and Debt,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39, no. 1 (2010): 225–40.
Richard Grassby, Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and Business in the English Speaking World, 1580–1740 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 277–82.
Charles H. Haskins, “The Life of Medieval Students as Illustrated by Their Letters,” American Historical Review 3, no. 2 (1898): 203–29.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada, followed by the successes of Maurice of Nassau on the battlefield raised the hopes of the rebels. Robert Fruin, Tien jaren uit den Tachtigjarigen Oorlog, 1588–1598 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1899). Individuals across Europe appear to have developed a deep interest in news about military affairs. Gestrich, “Public Sphere and the Habermas Debate”;
Mario Infelise, “The War, the News, and the Curious: Italian Military Gazettes in Italy,” in The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe, eds. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron (London: Routledge, 2001); Arblaster, “Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers.”
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© 2013 Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan
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Sadler, J. (2013). News as a Path to Independence: Merchant Correspondence and the Exchange of News during the Dutch Revolt. In: Jacob, M.C., Secretan, C. (eds) In Praise of Ordinary People. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380524_4
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