42 | Mass Media and Historical Change
northern Italy: despite affluence and high literacy rates, newspapers did not
appear there until 1636, as they had formerly been prohibited by the author-
ities. As with printing, expansion proceeded only tentatively in the north and
especially the east of Europe. The first newspaper published in the Swedish
language did not appear until 1645, the first Danish one in 1672, and the first
Polish one in 1661 (Welke and Wilke 2008: 234). In Russia, newspapers only
began to establish themselves in the course of Peter the Great’s reforms, from
1702, as a means to mobilise the populace for the war against Sweden and to
inform about domestic and foreign policy (Plambeck 1982: 39–43; McReyn-
olds 1991: 16). However, since profits remained low because of limited read-
ership, most newspapers and periodicals were short-lived (Marker 1985: 167).
In Hungary, too, the periodical press only began to develop in the eighteenth
century during Maria Theresia’s era of enlightened absolutism. Above all, the
country’s almost complete lack of urban middle-class culture inhibited press
expansion (Bachleitner and Seidler 2007; Balogh and Tarnói 2007). In those
parts of Europe belonging to the Ottoman Empire, newspapers were not intro-
duced until sometime in the nineteenth century. In Bulgaria, for instance, the
first long-running weekly paper appeared in print in 1848 (Gesemann 1987:
230). Therefore, if the invention of the newspaper is to be understood as a
media revolution, it is clear that it only occurred in parts of Western Europe
in the seventeenth century.
Nonetheless, the newspaper was an internationally connective medium
that triggered various transfers. As with book printing, it was German printers
who first spread the new invention, with the Dutch following suit. Thus it
came about that the first English and French newspapers in 1620 were actu-
ally translations of the Dutch Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt ..., which from
1622 were published rather sporadically by English printers under titles such
as Weekly News from Italy ... (Raymond 2003: 130; Schultheiß-Heinz 2004:
33). In Poland, the first papers to be circulated were in German, and starting in
1634, two printers from Germany published newspapers in their native tongue
in Denmark for three decades before the first Danish periodicals were issued
(Nielsen, in Welke and Wilke 2008: 198). In Sweden, German printers even
undertook the task of creating an official Swedish newspaper whose contents
and design were modelled on and thus closely resembled a Hamburg paper
(Ries, in Dooley and Baron 2001: 238). Most of the newspapers which emerged
in the second half of the eighteenth century in Hungary were also written
in German, since they were aimed primarily at educated, German-speaking
Upper Hungarians (Czibula, in Blome 2000: 115; Balogh and Tarnói 2007).
Enforcing restrictions on newspaper distribution was also common prac-
tice in many North and West European countries, where the authorities only
permitted a limited number of loyal newspapers. The Gazette, for instance,
which had originally been produced in support of the King and significantly