Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
3 Seventeenth Century Journalistic Sources as Providers
of Information on Earthquakes of North-West Africa
The two aims of the present study are: (a) to retrieve and critically analyse the
original sources responsible for the inclusion of studied earthquakes in the north
African seismic record; and (b) to collect additional information on the same earth-
quakes from contemporary sources. As the large majority of the sources concerned
are of a journalistic nature, it is opportune to provide here some information con-
cerning the 17th century European journalistic network, a body of serial historical
sources of outstanding importance for information relating to the Mediterranean
basin (Camassi and Castelli, 2004).
In the 17th century, news circulated in three basic ways: as “
Avvisi
”, gazettes
and pamphlets. The
Avvisi
(literally translated as “Announcements”) were short
manuscript summaries of recent occurrences in one or several towns, and were
issued regularly to subscribers. Gazettes were rather like
Avvisi
in layout (correspon-
dence from several sites), range of topics (wide) and style (terse), but unlike
Avvisi
they were meant for a more general market. Pamphlets (also known as tracts, broad-
sheets, canards, and
Relazioni
) were cheap printed accounts of single occurrences
that were often of a sensational nature, also meant for a more general market. The
modern equivalents of these three forms of news circulation would be press-agency
releases, general newspapers and the tabloid newspapers, respectively.
North African news generally reached the Italian journalistic market via the
Thyrrenian seaports, such as Genoa and Leghorn, both of which produced their own
Avvisi
and also despatched them to Florence, Genoa, Rome and elsewhere. Venice,
the other great Italian newsgathering centre, is less important than the Thyrrenian
seaports for the present study as it was mostly focused on the Balkan and Eastern
Mediterranean areas.
Generally speaking,
Avvisi
and gazette writers tried to be fairly accurate, and
would explicitly disclaim any seemingly relevant items of news if it turned out to
be untrue. The same could not always be said of the cheaper pamphlets, among
which fabrications abounded. For the term fabrication, the concept is of a story
that although presented as “new” news, was actually duplicated from earlier pam-
phlets and therefore not new, or potentially not even true at all, although their actual
contents could originally have been both new and true (Caracciolo, 2001). These
were thus prepared by taking a story that had been reported by a different pamphlet,
giving it a new date, freshening it up a little by changing a few names, transposing
a few adjectives, and adding a paragraph or two. The result was a story ready to be
sold as “new”. The easiest stories to multiplicate in this way were those set in exotic
places, which had the double advantage of lowering the chances of their ever being
easily checked or refuted, while counting on the age-old human tendency to equate
“abroad” with “outlandish”. The countries on the southern and eastern Mediter-
ranean shores were particularly associated in the collective imagination of 17th cen-
tury Italy as the abode of the pirates that periodically raided the Italian coasts (Davis,
2004). These thus represented far-off places of wonder and fear, with odd customs
that were known through the tales of ransomed prisoners. It can therefore maybe be
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