EC project "Review of Historical Seismicity in Europe" (RHISE) 1989-1993

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• Introduction
• The newspaper
• Records about calamities
• Conclusions
• References

Introduction
This paper reports the first results of research concerning the information network in Europe between XVII and XVIII century. The situation of Bologna in comparison with the general Italian and European context is considered at first. A further aim of this work is also a general study of the importance of the gazettes as sources of information about calamitous events in that period.

Goals
The starting point has been the analysis of Bologna in its time and context, in order to investigate the European and Italian information network, with particular attention to:
- extension of the network and its sensitivity with respect to natural disasters or social accidents (fires, famine, plagues, etc.);
- time of transmission of the news, itineraries, modifications to which they were subjected, from the starting point through the correspondents to the final destination;
- main subjects and their distribution;
- main areas of origin of the news.
The main goal is to evaluate the potential of a XVIII century gazette as a source for the investigation of a specific theme like earthquakes, in order to extend the potential for earthquakes already listed in the catalogues, and to find records of unknown earthquakes.

The events
Three categories of events have been considered:
- natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, damaging floods and storms, etc.);
- social accidents (fires, epidemics);
- strange events, for instance meteorites, etc.
The general idea is to consider all the events which are in some way comparable with the earthquakes, that is damaging events not caused by human will and of some social relevance. Therefore, accidents to single persons, mostly reported because of their social position, or events produced by man (for instance sabotage), have not been considered.

Methodology
This project consists of a complete examination of Bologna from 1670 till 1770, the compilation of all information concerning natural calamities, the analytical comparison of some particular periods or events reported on the Italian and European gazettes.
This is consistent with similar investigations (de la Torre, 1990, 1993; Albini and de la Torre, 1993), which have shown the high potential of this approach. The output of this first phase will be completed by a detailed analysis of the responses of Bologna in the cases of some important earthquakes, such as 1690, Villach; 1693, Sicily; 1703, Central Italy; 1726, Sicily; 1743, Jonian Sea; 1755, Lisbon.
Just to find out new information about these well-known events was not our intention; rather, we wanted to investigate into the information network in Europe and Italy between XVII and XVIII centuries, checking eventually the changes inside this mechanism.
The analysis of Bologna is here limited to the period 1699-1726.

The newspaper
In the XVII century the first Gazettes were issued in Europe (Capra et al., 1986): the first one in Bologna was published by Nicolò Tebaldini, in 1643. It had foolscap format and consisted of a file of daily news from Italy and abroad (Biancini, 1936); like all the coeval gazettes it has no proper title but the name of the town where it is printed gradually increases, so that Bologna ends occupying the whole heading with banner headlines in form of the titles. Since 1647 it was owned by Giovanni Battista Ferroni; then, after 1660 by Giacomo Monti and after 1708 by the family of Antonio and Giovanni Battista Sassi. In January 1708 it becomes a bi-weekly, eight pages Gazzetta di Bologna, with a format slightly smaller than the previous one.
Bologna belongs to the "official" journals, that is, it was controlled by the government, in this case ecclesiastic; however, the geographic location and the relative autonomy of the Bologna government from the central authority of the Papal States made it a privileged observer of Italian events (Sorbelli, 1929; Bellocchi, 1977).

Morphology
The issues of Bologna start generally with local news, followed by news from Roma and, always in the same order, Napoli, Firenze (or Pisa, Siena, Pistoia), Livorno, Milano, Genova, Torino. Further on come correspondences from Madrid, Lisboa, Paris (occasionally from other French towns), Luzern (Bern, Geneve and others), Köln (Frankfurt, Hamburg), Den Haag, Bruxelles, London, Wien, Poland (Kracow, Warsaw, Gdansk, Czestochowa); finally Venezia or Mantova (also belonging to the Republic of Venice).
A further level of organisation of the information can be seen in each correspondence, so that the news is put in order of relative importance. It is to be noted that, in a different way from XIX and XX century journals, which are normally organized into different categories - sport, politics, economy, art, etc. - indicated by titles, gazettes of XVII and XVIII century were divided into correspondences and not categories of news, so that the gazette was read like a book and drawn up like standard printed book.

The information network
The first evidence concerns a certain regularity of the correspondences (Tab. 1), which is related to the postal service, by means of which the news was sent. It is not clear whether what is published as a correspondence from a locality (for instance "Vienna 17 caduto" - Wien, the 17th of the previous month) is a summary of another gazette, in this case published in Wien and then sent to Bologna by the publisher, or if it comes from letters sent by the publishers or by correspondents in Wien.
Probably, most of the news came from other publishers (Habermas, 1977), otherwise it would have been very difficult to collect weekly so much information and to fill a gazette with such important and good quality news. The information directly collected by the single publishers was usually sent to other colleagues.
Apparently, the news originated from informal sources (letters, travellers' accounts) or by local Avvisi, and arrived at the publisher by chance, or was exchanged with some regularity with other towns publishers.
A clear study of the information channels presents not only a storiographical interest but make clear which "filters" the news used to meet before being published. It can be supposed that correspondents didn't exchange the gazettes but used to send their information in a private way.
Another interesting aspect is a certain flexibility in joining usual correspondences to the ones connected to political, military or social circumstances: in summer 1703 for example, news from Lyon, Montpellier, Nimes and other cities was intensified when the central power in France had difficulties with religious "fanatics".
News from the Ottoman Empire does not look so regular: it came through Wien or Venezia by letters by merchants, important travellers or sailors.
In all it can be observed that for military reports the network (Fig. 1) covers the whole Europe (there are reports also from Lappony): for other subjects some permanent shade-areas were present such as Prussia, Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia, Russia, the European part of the Ottoman Empire, Scotland and Ireland; news from Iberia, some German states and Poland was intermittent.
No news arrived directly from outside Europe to Bologna, but it passed through the capitals: Madrid, Lisboa, London, Paris and Bruxelles. Some news arrived from the Americas, less from Central Africa and even less from the East. News from Mediterranean Africa came through Mediterranean harbours. From Wien came news of Tartars, dealing with military alliances of Turks, Muscovites and Swedish.

Routes and times of the news
News did not always take the shortest way to reach its destination (Tab. 1).

Many examples are available. The news of a French army arriving in Mantova came from Wien; news from Freiburg of a false alarm of a plague in Breisach came via Köln; news from Firenze arrived in Bologna by correspondence from Roma (1702.11.28) and news about an earthquake in Umbria arrives from Roma.
The mail service tried to use the shortest way for delivering the correspondence, but there was no information agency or modern-day technology as centralizing elements (Fedele e Mainoldi, 1980). Considering all that, a deeper examination of the postal system is needed.

The interferences
Different cases of interferences in the delivery of information can be found: the first one is "official", sometimes the authority decided to forbid the "commerce of letters". This problem appears for example in Holland as a war began (1702.06.20); another interference is found when some confused news about a dam breaking in Holland arrived from the Government in Köln (Bologna, 1702.05.2):
"Köln, 16th April. Even though we have heard many stories about the damage caused in the neighbourhood by the downfall of the big Myden-dam in Holland, we don't really know the circumstances of these events, probably because those States have used many ways to prevent the immediate diffusion of such disastrous news".
A second form of interference is the one caused by the priority of other news. In this case we have the example of an earthquake which occurred near Worms in Germany (Bologna 1699.08.4):
"Köln, 19th (...) We read from Vormatia that the 'riformati' have obtained permission to build a Temple there and last Sunday, in the open air, they took their physical exercise, held a sermon and a Supper. In the neighbourhood of that city an earthquake occurred that destroyed some houses".
Another form of interference is due to the importance of war news which made vanish all usual news, including calamities.
The last cause of interference was climatic factors: big snow-falls, as in winter 1709, floods, storms, etc. (Fig. 2). Because of these natural calamities it was impossible for news and letters to reach their destination.

Degree of importance of the events
According to Minuti (1984), impartiality is a general characteristic of gazettes in XVII century. News was however expressed according to the sensibility, needs and conditions of the current time. Therefore, sometimes colourful descriptions of battles can be found, together with only one line about the union treaty between England and Scotland, placed penultimately among the news from London (1706.08.10).
In many other news a hierarchical order among the information can be found. In the Bologna doubts were often expressed on the reality of some news; in many cases the writers add that they are "waiting for a confirmation" and there are also examples of considerable later corrections.

Records about calamities
Going through the Bologna from 1699 to 1726, a large number of calamity records have been collected (Tab. 2). The quantity of records does not reflect the real number of events: information following the event - for example safety measures carried out in order to prevent a plague diffusion from a territory nearby, or tradesmen and travellers who write about the effects caused by events already described in the local press - are also found. The lack of local news in the gazette will probably need a separate study.
The largest part of earthquake records come from the central and southern part of Italy, that means Roma and Napoli: 41 out of 43 records from Roma and 41 out of 41 from Napoli. All that can be explained by the presence of two important seismic periods: 1702 (southern Italy) and, mostly, the year 1703 (central Italy).
Other records about plagues, floods and eruptions come from Roma, while records of Vesuvius eruptions (16), climatic and social calamities - crashes, fires, etc. - come from Napoli.
As for the news coming from abroad, the most important correspondences are from Venezia and Wien - especially in relation to the Balkans and central and eastern Europe. Significant for north-eastern Europe are the correspondences from Köln and Hamburg. Paris, in spite of its political importance, seemed to feel the war's effects in relation to its information network only; the situation seems to be different for the Netherlands. Finally, Luzern shows the most detailed correspondences, both for its precision on events location and for the analytical description of facts.

Earthquakes
150 records informing about earthquakes have been found. 107 of them are single earthquake records; 27 inform about events described previously; the remaining 16 are mostly concerned with religious celebrations in relation to earthquakes. Tab. 3 shows the origin of the earthquake records: 72 earthquakes took place in Italy, 29 in Europe, 6 in other countries. Comparing the correspondence origin with the location of the event, it can be seen that 7 events reported by Venezia happened outside Italy. Milano writes about two earthquakes, one of them is located outside Europe (Japan).

The amount of information collected in Roma is bigger than the one from Napoli: also the descriptive details are better from Roma than from Napoli.
Six records can be classified as "hidden" or subordinate to other. This fact is not connected with the event's severity, but must be compared with other more important events that sometimes caused information to be discarded.
The presence of religious celebrations related to earthquakes is a clear sign of the importance given by the community to some natural events, but the space-time connection becomes quite relative. For instance, in the case of the earthquake in Central Italy of 1703, a report of a celebration in Bologna during the same year but without chronological information for the earthquake is found; the text does not tell whether the earthquake was felt in Bologna, while this information comes from other sources (Gazzetta di Napoli, 1703.02.13): "Bologna 3rd Feb. Yesterday morning we felt a little earthquake in the city and it was felt in Firenze, too...".
This example confirms the strange absence of local information in the gazettes of that century. Anyway, the simple news of a celebration "because of an earthquake" can be either a sign of a real event or of the circulation of news on an event that happened elsewhere.

Conclusions
Tab. 4 presents a sample of the analysis of the earthquake records; issues of the gazette, place and date of the correspondence and place and date of the event are compared.
In the fourth column, affected areas and dates of the earthquake are shown, together with a short indicative classification of the event's severity; in the fifth column, date and epicentral area according to the Italian catalogue (Postpischl, 1985) are reported for comparison.
An interesting aspect is the presence of a great number of events which appear unknown to the Italian catalogue: 32 out of 72 (Fig. 3). This result seems surprising, because Bologna was said to have been exploited by a seismological compilation (De Rossi, 1889) which, on its turn, significantly contributed to Baratta (1901), main background of the Italian catalogue.

Actually this result confirms what already pointed out by Albini and de la Torre (1993), with respect to the analysis of other European periodicals, such as Gaceta de Madrid and Mercure de France.
It is also important to notice that some unknown events are damaging ones (see the one dated 26 Jan. 1708).

Finally, it seems reasonable that a general evaluation of the "Bologna" potential will be possible with further research in order to make clear the reliability of the European gazettes between XVII and XVIII century.

References
Albini, P. and Rodriguez de la Torre, F., 1993. Known and unknown earthquakes through some European periodicals of the eighteenth century. Terra Nova, 5: 481-487.
Baratta, M., 1901. I terremoti d'Italia. Torino.
Bellocchi, U., 1977. Il fenomeno giornalistico. Storia dell'Emilia Romagna, Bologna, pp. 339-359.
Biancini, B., 1936. Trecent'anni di Giornalismo a Bologna. Dagli "Avvisi" seicenteschi allíepoca napoleonica. Bologna, Rivista del Comune, settembre 1936, pp. 23-34.
Capra, C., Castronuovo, V. e Ricuperati, G., 1986. La stampa italiana fra '500 e '600. Bari.
De Rossi, M.S. (ed.), 1889. Documenti raccolti dal defunto conte Antonio Malvasia per la storia dei terremoti massime d'Italia. Memorie della Pontificia Accademia dei Nuovi Lincei, V, pp. 169-289, Roma.
Fedele, C. e Mainoldi, F., 1980. Bologna e le sue poste. Bologna.
Habermas, J., 1977. Storia e critica della opinione pubblica. Roma.
Minuti, R., 1984. Giornali e opinione pubblica nell'Inghilterra del settecento. Studi Storici, 2, pp. 319-331.
Postpischl, D. (Editor), 1985. Catalogo dei terremoti italiani dall'anno 1000 al 1980. Quad. Ric. Scient., 114, 2B, Bologna.
Rodriguez de la Torre, F., 1990. Management and Interpretation of Hemerographical Sources Concerning Research About Historical Iberian Seismicity. In: GPSN, INMG, LNEC, CSN, Proc. Workshop Historical Earthquakes in the Ibero-Maghrebian Region. Methodological approach and case studies, Lisbon, 15-17 November 1989, IV, 23-94.
Rodriguez de la Torre, F., 1993. Lecturas sistemáticas de prensa periódica. Hacia una revisión de la sismicidad europea durante los siglos XVII y XVIII. In: M. Stucchi (Editor), Materials of the CEC project "Review of Historical Seismicity in Europe", Milano, 1, pp. 247-258.
Sorbelli, A., 1929. Storia della stampa in Bologna. Bologna.

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