The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [44]
One Burgundian merchant, Jacques Coeur, used his own pigeon post. The Medici bankers kept in regular contact with their branch managers and their forty-odd representatives all over Europe by using posting messengers. These went very much faster than the average traveller, who could not afford to change horses when they became exhausted. With fresh horses the couriers could average ninety miles a day, more than twice as much as an ordinary rider.
Nonetheless, rumour coloured the reception of news even in the cities, when it arrived often after lengthy delays. In the fifteenth century it took eighteen months for the news of Joan of Arc’s death to reach Constantinople. The news of that city’s fall in 1453 took a month to get to Venice, twice as long to Rome, and three months to reach the rest of Europe. Later, the perception of the distance travelled by Columbus was coloured by the fact that the news of his landfall across the Atlantic had taken as long to reach the streets of Portugal as did news from Poland.
For the villager or household not connected with trade, news came for the most part with the travelling entertainers, small parties of musicians and poets called jongleurs, or troubadours. The former was usually the performer, the latter the writer or composer. Their acts might also include juggling, magic, performing animals and even circus acts. Principally, their entertainment took the form of recitals of poems and songs written about real events.
Since the audience would hear the story only once, the performance was histrionic, repetitive, easily memorised, and often reworked from the original into local dialect for the benefit of the audience. The portrayal of emotion was simple and exaggerated. The entire performance was in rhyme, so that both performer and audience could more easily remember it. The performer took all the parts, changing voice and gesture to suit. The more enjoyable the act, the more money he made. If a poem were particularly successful, other jongleurs would try to hear it several times in order to memorise and later perform it themselves.
A fourteenth-century French ivory bas-relief shows two troubadour minstrels. Their theatrical nature is revealed by their elaboratively carved lute heads and embroidered shoes.
The travelling poets were often used by a patron to spread a particular piece of propaganda. Poems of this nature were called sirventes. Ostensibly on a romantic theme, they often concealed political or personal messages. In rare cases the object of the satire was openly named. In 1285 Pedro III of Aragon attacked Philip III of Spain in a sirvente. The most famous thirteenth-century propaganda writer of this type of material was Guillaume de Berjuedin. The performances of these kinds of poems must have had the desired effect, because in an oral world where the strongest bond was loyalty, reputation was of cardinal importance and rumour therefore an effective weapon.
The jongleurs would often meet and exchange parts of their repertoire. These meetings, called puys, were held all over France and took the form of a kind of poetry competition at which the jongleurs would display their phenomenal memories. A good jongleur needed to hear several hundred lines of poetry only three times to commit them all to memory. This was a common enough ability at the time: university teachers were known to be able to repeat a hundred lines of text shouted to them only once by their pupils.
Mummers arrive at the Nuremberg Shrovetide Fair in the mid-fifteenth century. The vivid, unsubtle costumes they wear reflect the simple and repetitive nature of the material their audience would hear and remember.
As the markets grew and spread, these international merchants setting