The Establishment of Periodicals | 41the Upper Rhine, he created a printed newspaper called Relation aller Für-
nemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien... (newspaper of all important and
memorable histories...), a by-product combining his work as a printer and
distributor of news (Welke in Welke and Wilke 2008). In 1605, he filed a
request for a concession on his invention before the municipal council. His
location in Strasbourg had the advantage of being the hub of the postal system;
moreover, messages were exchanged there between the German and French
territories. Thus for a second time, a key invention of media history emerged
in the Rhineland, abetted by the region’s population density, compression of
information and open trading culture.
In Western Europe, the invention of the newspaper was in the air at the
beginning of the seventeenth century. From the 1580s, printed news from
France and the Netherlands had increasingly appeared in England. By 1592 it
could be purchased in London at fairly regular intervals (News of France on the
First of the Month of March), and in the following year on set dates (Raymond
2003: 105–7). Dutch media historians occasionally assert that the first news-
paper published worldwide originated in Amsterdam in 1609 (Wijfjes, in
Broersma 2007: 61). What is certain is that in 1605 the Archdukes granted
a printer from Antwerp the privilege of regularly publishing ‘great events’,
particularly for the military (Morineau 1995: 34). Accordingly, newspapers
spread quickly in the region.
As is the case with the history of print, huge discrepancies are evident in the
spread of the newspaper in seventeenth-century Europe. The German-speak-
ing regions at the time boasted about two hundred newspaper titles, which
was more than the rest of Europe combined. Moreover, they were regionally
diversified, so that in the year 1669, seventeen of the thirty-two European
cities with newspapers were situated in the German Holy Roman Empire,
whereas centralised states such as Sweden, Denmark, England and France only
had newspapers printed in their capitals (Ries 1977: 179). Yet there were also
vast differences within the empire. At first newspapers were mainly produced
in the south and around Thuringia and Saxony, but with the exception of
Cologne and Hamburg, hardly at all in the northern and western parts of
Germany. The explanation lies in the particular cultural, economic and politi-
cal framework of these regions as well as their population density. Thus despite
its central location, hardly any long-running newspapers emerged in the Elec-
torate of Hanover before the eighteenth century for reasons of low demand
and authoritarian restrictions (Küster 2004: 138–57).
Newspapers experienced an early and widespread expansion in the Neth-
erlands, starting in 1618. As was the case in the Holy Roman Empire, the
country’s polycentric and religiously heterogeneous structure fostered this
development, as did the local printing tradition and urban prosperity. The
influence of politics on the spread of the new medium was also evident in