Tasso, Tassis, Taxis.

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.