Cunnan:Period headline news
Period headline news?
In case you haven't been reading the Village pump the following should clear this up
- OK, I want a new major category for an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I want to do a series of pages, with the high points of the news of the day for a place and other things that someone living there would know. I dont so much want wars and battles, but when the new bridge got put up, who the King is sleeping with this week, who the top poets are and whether or not the harvest was good or bad. I've got some scrawled notes for 1589, and I'd like a set of pages I can do ... a "News from a Place and Time" section would be ideal. And could I please appeal for some way to easily put footnotes into Wiki ? I'm a footnote junkie, because that empowers readers to go do their own research. - Anton
1589
There are bad harvests in Italy - in Venice the price of wheat has risen to five, six or seven ducats a quarter. As this has meant that the poor find it hard to bake bread, the Grain Office has permitted bakers to bake rice bread, with one part of rice to three parts of flour. Unfortunatly, according to Girolamo Savina, this bread being too savoury, it whetted the appetite. In order to safeguard the true interests of the poor, the Signoria ordered that millet bread be baked and sold to the poor : it was excerable. An influential Venbtian Senator, Leonardo Donato is thought to be involved, according to a man close to the Spanish consul, Juan de Coroca.
The influenza epidemic of the last year, that went from Venice to Milan, France and Catalonia has abated. This has been reported from German travellers, who are at the Black Eagle tavern in Venice, and have stayed at Il Falcone in Ferrara and the Tre Rei in Milan, as German travellers do, and was confirmed by a prominent Spanish merchant in Florence, Balthassar Suarez
Ali Beg's fleet has been destroyed off East Africa by the Portuguese, who sailed to do this from Lisbon.
The new Pepper Contract has been signed between the King of Spain and a consortium of the Fuggers and Welsers of Germany, and the Ximinez, Portuguesze conversos, or Jews who have embraced Catholicism. The price is thirty ducats a cantar, for a quantity of thirty thousand cantars. A cantar is roughly sixty English pounds (25 kilos). The pepper is said to cost His Most Catholic Magesty three ducats a cantar in the Spice Islands.
The Santa Maria di Gracia, a ship of Venice, has sailed from Venice to England, docking in London in October. It is hoped this ship will signal a return to Ventian trade with England.
The English ambassador in Istanbul is William Harborne. He is the most senior of a series of English commercial agents, including John Lucas in Malta, Richard Hunt in Genoa and John Tipton in the pirate city of Algiers.
The Spanish are commanded in Flanders by the Duke of Parma, Alexander Farnese. He is denying any responsibility whatsoever for the disaster that befell the Spanish fleet last year at the hands of the English, and thereby caused the postmonement of the King of Spain's Enterprise of England.
Footnotes ; Braudel, Meditteranean (v1) p626 for the English ambassadors. ibid p600 for the bad harvests. ibid p524 for the Santa Maria di Gracia.
