The Breakthrough of Typographic Printing | 23New media technology was suppressed even more rigidly in the Ottoman
regions. Even though the import of worldly print-work was permitted from
the end of the sixteenth century onwards, printing houses did not evolve until
sometime in the eighteenth century. The Napoleonic campaigns, in partic-
ular, were responsible for introducing some of the first printing presses to
the Arab world – a fact which is recognised as a historical turning point in
Arabian historiography as well (cf. Roper, in Baron et al. 2007: 250). In South
East Europe, printing also failed to develop to any significant extent under
Ottoman occupation. Consequently, the first printing house in long-term use
emerged only in 1577 in Upper Hungary; in Bratislava, it was even as late as
1610 (Komorová 2007: 186). The ‘media revolution’ of Gutenberg’s inven-
tion was in this respect not even a European, but for some time rather a West
European, manifestation whose powerful development, even in these parts,
occurred only in certain core regions.
The European transfer of new media production often took place as a result
of the emigration of German printers. Italy, Flanders, France and Spain were
destinations of particular interest because higher profits could be expected.
Occasionally, the print-work produced by Germans in Italy was then sold back
to Germany, for as a result of the West European dissemination of printing,
export centres were rapidly evolving. Their purpose was to provide other Euro-
pean countries with literature, even targeting their clientele with print-work in
their respective vernacular language. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it
was the city of Venice that constituted the largest printing location worldwide
(Burke 2000: 190). North of the Alps, Cologne soon played a large part, with
Basel and Antwerp, in particular, following shortly after, and the distribution
area of the book trade extending all the way to Portugal and England (Ned-
dermeyer 1998: 395–99). The Central European region which stretched from
Flanders to South Germany and Lombardy thus formed the centre of the
new medium. Of slightly less importance than the export and emigration of
printers was the transmission of the new printing technique through printed
instructions. The art of printing was initially regarded as knowledge which was
not divulged through printing manuals, until the first ones appeared in the
seventeenth century (Giesecke 1991: 71). This, too, underpins the dominant
role of economic interests, although in this case it rather impeded the expan-
sion of the new medium.
The fact that this invention had sprung from the mind of a German, and
was therefore also promoted by the Germans, generated a certain sense of
superiority in contemporary self-perception. In the Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation, the notion was thus articulated that the German inven-
tion had much improved the cultural reputation of the Reich, which would
no longer appear as a ‘land of barbarians’ to Italy (Füssel 1999: 48; Scholz
2004: 21). Such statements are on occasions interpreted as evidence (a bit