Featured Graduate Student Research: Rachel Midura

“Masters of the Post: Northern Italy and the European Communications Network, 1530-1730” explores how the institutions of the first postal systems were formed and exported with such great success from Northern Italy, particularly by a single family: the Tassis of Bergamo, later the imperial noble house of Thurn und Taxis. Habsburg Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V employed the enterprising Tassis family of Bergamo as postal administrators from the beginning of the sixteenth century. Janetto Tasso and his descendants drew on a long local tradition of transport and delivery to build a system of mounted couriers and staging posts across Europe, connecting hubs in Innsbruck, Brussels, and later Milan. Postal technology brought a communication revolution, fundamentally restructuring the European experience of time and space.

The Europe Center has supported my dissertation research since my initial archival trips to Northern Italy, where I worked in archives and libraries in Bergamo, Milan, Venice, Verona, and Brescia. This summer, I took a final research trip to the Fürstliche Thurn und Taxis Zentralarchiv und Hofbibliothek in Regensburg, Germany, the familial home, archives, and library of the Thurn und Taxis family. While my dissertation focuses on the Northern Italian branches of the family, the German archives preserve hundreds of boxes related to interaction with family branches located in the Holy Roman Empire and Spanish Netherlands. The collections have been primarily utilized by German historians like Wolfgang Behringer for scholarship on the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I was able to locate many previously unpublished (and in some cases, miscataloged) documents related to the Spanish and Italian branches of the family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Three collections – the Posturkunden, Postakten, and Haus und Familiesachen – were of particular importance for my work. While scholars like Martin Dallmeier have previously published excerpts from the Posturkunden and Postakten, access to the full documents in their original languages was crucial for my arguments regarding the development of administrative terminology over time. The Haus und Familiesachen contains a far more miscellaneous collection of familial correspondences, administrative notes, and letter wrappers tracking the times of arrival and departure of couriers. I found a number of sources by Tassis women that will support my argument that they played a key role in postal operations, from better known figures like Postmistress Alexandrine von Rye von Thurn und Taxis of Brussels, to lesser known examples, such as Postmistress Isabella Taxis of Augsburg. The correspondence made clear how the Tassis family retained strong ties to Italy; often writing in Italian, ordering and mailing art and books from Venice and Milan, visiting family members, and discussing relevant news and political events. These documents will enrich my understanding of how the Tassis family built and maintained a family “brand,” through apprenticeship, intermarriage, and even mediating inheritance battles.

In addition to the archive, I had access to the world’s most comprehensive secondary source collection on the Tassis family and postal history more broadly. I was able to consult several hard-to-find local histories and museum catalogs that will provide me with important references and visual accompaniments for the dissertation. Finally, I met with archive director Dr. Peter Styra and head librarian Dr. Ulrike Weiss, who I will keep in contact with as my research moves forward.