John Gallagher, the author of Learning Languages in Early Modern England, has a very informative LRB review (archived) of two books on the transmission of information in Early Modern Europe, Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura and The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe by Joad Raymond Wren. Anyone interested in the topic should read the whole thing; I’ll excerpt a few bits, starting with the onomastic tidbit that inspired my post title:
The early modern postal system had its origins in medieval northern Italy, on the plains south of the Alps where couriers beetled between Milan and Venice, Verona and Mantua, and where guides could be hired to accompany the intrepid traveller or jaded merchant through Alpine passes. Political intrigue and commercial exigency fed the need for a reliable service. A letter might be marked with the words cito cito cito – ‘quickly quickly quickly’ – to spur on its carrier or adorned with a sketched hangman’s noose as a warning to anyone who threatened to delay or disrupt its progress. The speed with which mail came to traverse the region, and beyond, was due in large part to the work of the Tassis family, which began operating a company of couriers in the Italian city states around 1290. Later, as success brought ennoblement and they sought to distance themselves from their humble beginnings, the Tassis would be known as the House of Thurn und Taxis (which operated the Thurn-and-Taxis Post), but their roots were in the Valle Brembana, below the Alps and not far from the roads that linked Milan to Venice.
Readers of The Crying of Lot 49 are, of course, familiar with the Thurn-and-Taxis monopoly and the the post horn symbol that signifies it (we await silent Tristero’s empire); I was struck by the fact that Taxis was apparently a Latinization of the surname Tassis, but the Wikipedia article says the family name was Tasso and provides this dubious information:
When the Brussels line was raised to the hereditary status of counts in 1624, they needed illustrious lineage to legitimize their intended further ascension to the high nobility. Alexandrine von Taxis commissioned genealogists to “clarify” their origin, who until then had only been considered a family descending from medieval knights who had become merchants. They now claimed, albeit without documentary evidence, that they descended from the Italian noble family Della Torre, or Torriani, who had ruled in Milan and Lombardy until 1311. She then applied to the emperor for a name change. With the Germanization, the coat of arms symbol of the Milanese family, the tower (Torre), became Thurn (an older German spelling, nowadays Turm) and was placed in front of the actual family name Tasso, translated with Taxis (an older German spelling for Dachs = Badger). The tower of the Torriani was added to the badger as a coat of arms. They formally adopted the German form of their name in 1650, including the comital Innsbruck line, which also exists to this day.
How can Thurn be “an older German spelling” of Turm? And, even more pressingly, how can Taxis be “an older German spelling” of Dachs? Is this seventeenth-century nonsense or modern nonsense? At any rate, here’s a passage about the “postal wars”:
Tassis pre-eminence was never unquestioned, but the cousinly rivalries that risked breaking up the firm were made more serious by the fragmentation of Habsburg power that followed the abdication of the exhausted and unwell Emperor Charles V in 1556. Changing political winds in Spain prompted a thorough audit of the Milan post office, then overseen by Lucina Cattanea Tassis and her postmaster lieutenant, Ottavio Codogno; they were accused of fraud and negligence that had cost the Habsburgs the eye-watering sum of 118,000 lire. Yet this kind of administrative peril was still preferable to the fate of their postmaster in Rome, Giovan Antonio Tassis, who in 1556 was arrested, tortured and imprisoned for more than a year and a half as part of a battle over control of the posts in the Papal States.
Giovan Antonio was a victim of the ‘postal wars’ that played out across the same terrain as the military battles fought between European powers in the later 15th and 16th centuries for control of Italy. Midura explores the postal wars as a struggle between ‘information sovereignty’ (that is, ‘the right to establish a secure channel of information in external territory’) and ‘communications monopoly’. States, of which there were many in early modern Italy, disagreed about whether each prince should have total control over the communications services in his territory. The alternative was that couriers of other powers should be allowed to operate within the state’s frontiers. In places such as Ancona and Rimini, handover points for mail travelling back and forth between Venice and the Papal States, it wasn’t unknown for fistfights to break out between postal workers serving the rival powers. Giovan Antonio’s time behind bars, grim though it must have been, helped to establish the principle that couriers and postmasters should be protected from harassment or violence; foreign posts ‘were now treated as parallel embassies’.
This bit explains something that mystified the Hattery in 2019 (laowai: “How did the spleen come to be associated with an audible digestive noise?”; Aidan Kehoe: “if any mammal’s spleen is making noise, something is very very wrong, it’s an odd abdominal organ to go for”):
Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it. A horse transporting mail between Tassis relay stations in 1425 travelled at just under 15 kilometres per hour. At that speed, between a trot and a gallop, a horse could keep going for about an hour and a half before the risk of overheating and damaging its spleen became critical.
This involves an Italian word with an etymology that had not leapt to my eye:
Highway robbery – svaligiamento – was a constant threat on the roads of northern Italy, where bandits in false moustaches or beards and leather masks targeted the routes known to be taken by couriers transporting valuables.
Wiktionary tells us that this is “From s- (‘out of’) + valigia (‘bag, case’) […], literally ‘to get [another’s possessions] out of a bag’.” And this is interesting material on early sources of news:
Those who could read and afford it could pay for a manuscript newsletter. A growing number of professional newswriters – menanti, reportisti, novellari, Zeitungschreiberen, newsmongers, gazetteers – offered a subscription service that packaged together all the items of news they had been able to glean, sent regularly to news-hungry subscribers among whom were private individuals, government figures, elite families such as the Medici and the Fuggers, and corporations. The Dutch East India Company spent 25 guilders on newsletters in 1606 alone. The manuscript newsletter, originally an avviso with its roots in the Italian cities of the later medieval period, was a tenacious genre that survived long beyond the beginnings of print and the emergence of the printed newspaper. The avviso was an unadorned weekly hit of news. One written by Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti in 1478 began: ‘I have news from Pistoia from 15 December until 9 January 1478,’ before listing items from Genoa and Lyon. A standard avviso contained headline news presented telegrammatically, usually on the themes of politics, war, trade and diplomacy. A manuscript newsletter could be personalised (subscribers to Joseph Mede’s service in 1620s England got their own covering message to accompany their package of news) or they could contain privileged information, like the handwritten updates on parliamentary proceedings paid for by English subscribers throughout the 17th century.
The paragraph was the core unit of news. There was little change in the format of an 18th-century printed newspaper from that of a 14th-century manuscript newsletter. They were both, as Wren points out, an assemblage of discrete units, with each item of news tagged with ‘metadata’ indicating its date and place of origin. ‘Data were effectively tagged with their history of transmission,’ he writes. ‘This is the genius of the paragraph.’ Such information was used to assess trustworthiness. How recent was it? How far had it travelled, and did it come from a reliable source? Paragraphs made the news network visible: the same words moved between manuscript and print and back again, while the information they encoded survived translation and communication over long distances and across political and physical barriers.
Like I say, there’s plenty of food for thought.
This is what Pfeifer’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch says under Turm:
And according to Paul’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, Dachs is “ins Roman. übergegangen (it. tasso, frz. taisson)”. But I cannot find anything about a spelling “Taxis”. (The OHG spelling was apparently thahs, but the MHG forms already have d, not t)
And anybody who grew up with German TV in the 1960s will remember Vico Torriani.
This is what Pfeifer’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch says under Turm
Well I’ll be damned, I guess it is. Thanks!
By the way, the review mentions Lepanto, and it occurred to me that that would be another example of nasal dissimilation (Wiktionary: “Likely a dissimilation of Greek Ναύπακτος (Náfpaktos), with the stressed syllable become liquid”; Wikipedia: “By the late medieval period, the local name had evolved into Nepahtos (Νέπαχτος), Epaktos or Epahtos (Έπακτος, Έπαχτος). By the “Franks” (Latins) it was called Neopant, Nepant or Lepant”)… but I can’t find the thread where we discussed that. If anyone knows, I’ll be grateful for a link.
Google and Bing refuse to admit that alimal ever appeared in this blog, but it was in that thread, so if you have another way to search the comments, that should work.
Note btw that the arms of at least the current claimed Prince of Thurn u. Taxis are preposterously complex and subsubdivided, but appear to contain zero posthorns (whether muted or unmuted) anywhere among the grab-bag of various symbols included. OTOH, the current Prince combines his interest in auto racing with having successfully defended a dissertation on _Rational Nature Or Wishful Thinking? Freedom & Rationality in Aquinas And Their Medieval Critique_.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_von_Thurn_und_Taxis#/media/File:Coat_of_Arms_of_Thurn_and_Taxis.svg
I misread Lepanto as an “example of naval dissimilation”, which might also be true for all I know of military history.
@J.W.B.: A couple centuries earlier, you had to have 64 quarterings to be taken seriously. The Prince’s escutcheon is a model of restraint.
In other news, I’d know a lot more about heraldry if I could blazon that whole thing, but just out of curiosity, what’s the charge on the dexter base of the inescutcheon? Some kind of cutting tool?
Heraldry was a lot less obscure when the coat of arms was actually supposed to be, you know, painted on a shield.
@JF: Those look like shears, for shearing sheep.
Here’s a much more minimalist version of Th. und Tax. arms, featuring (per the discussion in the OP) a badger. But NOT a badger with a posthorn. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wappen_Thurn_und_Taxis.svg
I’m left wondering if Turm with m was extracted from the Turmbau zu Babel.
In Scientific, the American not-actually-badger is Taxidea taxus. Wiktionary on taxus: first the yew, latterly also the badger:
This supposed Gaulish word doesn’t have a Wiktionary entry and would definitely not have a k, but an element *taxs- interpreted as “badger” is common in Celtic personal names. (Honeybadger don’t care, I guess.)
So… Tasso, ennobled & pluralized to dei Tassi, then latinized to de Taxis (which happened a lot in Italy) doesn’t seem out of the question.
Until the [θ] > [d̥] shift.
@Y: Thanks, that selttles it (though as J.W. notes, the animal in the inescutcheon in the inescutcheon is not a sheep, as I thought, but a badger—I seem to have missed that part of the OP).
what’s the charge on the dexter base of the inescutcheon? Some kind of cutting tool?
like Y said, they could be sheep-shears – but they could also be older-style tailoring shears (small ones that shape come as thread-snippers in some sewing kits), and it seems like they’re blazoned the same (“shears”). i can’t see a connection either way, but this is heraldry, so it’s not exactly required.
Below the shears (in the fuller arms I posted the link to earlier …) is what looks to be a tree with a fish floating in front of it. Any insight into that is welcomed.
>see also Gaulish taksos (Delamarre, 2003).
I wonder whether one of the wiki entries is misspelled because here is something from the etymology for tadhg:
>from Proto-Celtic *taskos (“badger”). Cognate with Manx Taig and with Gaulish names like Tasgetius, Tasciovanus, Moritasgus.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Tadhg
I couldn’t get the Internet Archive of Delamarre to download, but here is a fascinating article linking Celtic *tazgos to badger despite the fact that its descendants don’t have that meaning in any extant language, through relatives in other languages and an otherwise unexplained taboo in an Irish tale of Tadgh.
@rozele: Thanks, that makes sense too. I’d guess the T. u. T. family would rather be associated with sheep farming than tailoring, but I certainly don’t know.
@J.W.B.: That looks like the coat of arms of the town of Bad Buchau. The explanation there is
I don’t know what connection the T. u. T. might have had with that town.
Other Web sites say that a fish is often a Christian symbol in heraldry as in other contexts.
Wikipedia clarifies everything: “They [Thurn und Taxis] are one of the mediatised Houses for their former Sovereign Imperial counties, later mediatised to Kingdom of Württemberg (Buchau Princely Abbey, now Bad Buchau), Kingdom of Bavaria and Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.” All I’d have to do now is look up “mediatize” instead of going to bed.
Mediatization refers to (mostly in the context of the Holy Roman Empire) changing a noble title from direct vassalage to the sovereign (the condition known as “imperial immediacy”) to vassalage under another intermediate noble. At one point, the Holy Roman Empire had hundreds of immediate vassals, many of them hedge knights with as little as a single manorial holding. This was an extremely unwieldy system, so there were eventually moves to mediatize these lesser nobles. This meant putting them under the authority of a great noble, while still leaving them a significant (albeit variable) degree of autonomy in their personal territory. In this case, we had a line of holders of several small counties that at one point enjoyed imperial immediacy, but which were later made parts of the much larger states of Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.
a tree with a fish floating in front of it. Any insight into that is welcomed.
it refers to the radchaai sonic translation of a song in an extinct language in which the lyric “memory is an event horizon / what’s caught in it is gone but it’s always there” sounds like the radchaai
Oh, tree! Eat the fish!
This granite folds a peach!
Oh, tree! Oh, tree! Where’s my ass?
the intertextuality may seem heavy-handed, but that’s pynchon sometimes.
It’s a little bit like the coat of arms of Glasgow (the tree and the fish, not the whole confusion), but that’s presumably coincidental.
mediatization
At one point in Proust, a hostess commits the awful solecism of supposing that a mere Count (who is horribly embarrassed at being put on the spot like this) should go in before the Baron de Charlus (duc de Brabant, damoiseau de Montargis, prince d’Oloron, de Carency, de Viareggio et des Dunes.) The Baron is very understanding, and tells her that he could see that she was out of her depth.
Per Jerry F.’s link, the fish on the arms of Buchau* is further specified in the German blazon to be a “Barsch.” That’s apparently cognate to English “bass” although one source says the referent is more what we would call a “perch,” which is not cognate despite superficial similarities. The fish on Glasgow’s municipal arms, FWIW, is blazoned as a salmon.
*Apparently not “Bad” Buchau until the 1960’s, when the name was supplemented as some sort of marketing hype. Don’t encourage them.
Seems like the T.u.T. acquired the Buchau Abbey post-mediatization — it’s not as if they passed the post of princess-abbess (!) down the family line. Actually, I can’t find any evidence that they ever held a direct imperial fief; prior to 1803 the family sett (so to speak) was a building in Frankfurt.
@F: According to German wikipedia the T u. T. princes were in unmediatized charge of Buchau for a brief space of three years (1803 to 1806). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsf%C3%BCrstentum_Buchau
Since we’re in Pynchon territory, let me invoke his mythical German spa town, Bad Karma.
So post mediatization, over Taxis is an Über?
Oh! Yes! Thanks, Ryan! This mess is what I was thinking of.
Bad is quite officially added to the names of places that can prove they’re proper spas with warm water coming out of the ground.
Barsch indeed refers to the European perch by default (as did bars in Middle English), but lots of percomorphs have names that are compounds of it. The European seabass, not a perciform but an acanthuriform percomorph, is Europäischer Wolfsbarsch on Wikipedia. …and it seems Linnaeus lumped all percomorphs as Perca. Typical.