News of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Antwerp and Brussels Press of the 1620s

The great mercantile city Antwerp and the Habsburg courtly residence Brussels were major centres of international communication and news exchange in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Europe, dominating postal interchanges. They were also locations of printing for the early periodical news press. Abraham Verhoeven’s Dutch-language serial known under the collective title Nieuwe Tijdinghen (New Tidings) survives in substantial runs from 1620 to 1629 (in the British Library, the Royal Library of Belgium, and elsewhere), and Arthur der Weduwen recently identified a cluster of anonymous news pamphlets from 1621 in Trinity College Dublin as a Brussels serial which he has given the collective title Nouvelles Neutrelles (Unbiased News), making a plausible claim for it being the earliest independent French-language newspaper. Both periodicals reported on Cossack raids along the Black Sea coast and on the Khotyn campaign of 1621. The Nieuwe Tijdinghen, furthermore, continued to carry news from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout its existence, although not with the same week-to-week regularity as news from Rome, Venice, Vienna or Cologne. These stories include Tatar raids, wars with Sweden, Baltic grain shipments, and Prince Waldyslaw Vasa’s grand tour of 1624 (especially his receptions in Brussels and Antwerp and his visit to the siegeworks of Breda). They demonstrate both the place of Poland-Lithuania in the information flows to two key nodes of the European communication networks of the 1620s, and how the affairs of the Commonwealth were presented to readers of the press as of both structural and occasional importance to the well-being of Europe as a whole.