The innovation made by Caesar consisted in instituting the publication
of a brief record of the transactions and resolutions of the senate, and
in his causing to be published the transactions of the assemblies of the
plebs, as well as other important matters of public concern.

The Germanic peoples who, after the Romans, assumed the lead in the
history of Europe were neither in civilization nor in political
organization fitted to maintain a similar constitution of the news
service; nor did they require it. All through the Middle Ages the
political and social life of men was bounded by a narrow horizon;
culture retired to the cloisters and for centuries affected only the
people of prominence. There were no trade interests beyond the narrow
walls of their own town or manor to draw men together. It is only in the
later centuries of the Middle Ages that extensive social combinations
once more appear. It is first the church, embracing with her hierarchy
all the countries of Germanic and Latin civilization, next the burgher
class with its city confederacies and common trade interests, and,
finally, as a counter-influence to these, the secular territorial
powers, who succeed in gradually realizing some form of union. In the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries we notice the first traces of an
organized service for transmission of news and letters in the messengers
of monasteries, the universities, and the various spiritual dignitaries;
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we have advanced to a
comprehensive, almost postlike, organization of local messenger bureaus
for the epistolary intercourse of traders and of municipal authorities.
And now, for the first time, we meet with the word _Zeitung_, or
newspaper. The word meant originally that which was happening at the
time (_Zeit_ = "time"), a present occurrence; then information on such
an event, a message, a report, news.

Venice was long regarded as the birthplace of the newspaper in the
modern acceptation of the word. As the channel of trade between the East
and the West, as the seat of a government that first organized the
political news service and the consular system in the modern sense, the
old city of lagoons formed a natural collecting center for important
news items from all lands of the known world. Even early in the
fifteenth century, as has been shown by the investigations of
Valentinelli, the librarian of St. Mark's Library, collections of news
had been made