With the 1480 Siege of Rhodes, we start to see the first use of the word ‘news’ in English to mean reports of recent events. You can reconstruct in quite a lot of detail who has the interest in the news, who has the means to produce the news, and you can locate that in particular moments in time, in cities, in political contexts.
About Anthony Bale
"I am Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. I research later medieval English literature and culture. Throughout my work I've been concerned with the relationship between margins and peripheries in medieval culture, and with recovering neglected sources and voices from the medieval past. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner.
My early work focussed on Christian-Jewish relations, popular religion, and the history of antisemitism, followed by studies of the poetry of John Lydgate, the cult of St Edmund of East Anglia, and medieval histories of emotion. This then led me into pilgrimage studies, the history of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and editing and translating The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford UP, 2012) by John Mandeville and The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford UP, 2016). In 2023 I published A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: the World through Medieval Eyes (Penguin, 2023; Norton 2024). From 2023-26 I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to support my research on the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes (1480) and the development of late medieval news media."
Key Points
• Rhodes was a crossroads of East and West under the Knights Hospitaller, a Western crusading order that protected and cared for pilgrims to Jerusalem.
• After 1453, rapid Ottoman expansion turned Western Christendom into what was perceived as a shrinking world and tightened Ottoman control over vital trade and pilgrimage routes.
• The 1480 siege of Rhodes sparked Europe-wide panic over Ottoman advances. John Kay’s Middle English account may have recorded the first English use of “news” for reports of recent events.
• News and propaganda spread through eyewitness reports, translations, images and compilations like Fasciculus temporum, which blurred history with current events. These sources reveal how power and omission shape narratives and modern fake news.
