Messrelation
A Messrelation was a print published in the 16th to 18th century for the book fairs in Frankfurt and Leipzig which reported news about political and military news since the last fair. Messrelationen are seen as precursors to modern newspapers as they were the first printed news media to be published periodically.
The Austrian scholar Michael von Aitzing is commonly seen as their inventor, having published for the first time a Relatio Historica at the autumn 1583 book fair in Frankfurt, in which he related the events in the Low Countries since February 1580 on 144 quarto pages. This was a huge success and from 1588 Aitzing published his "relations" twice a year, for the Easter book fair at Leipzig and for the autumn book fair at Frankfurt. Since 1590, competitors published their own Messrelationen. The first one from Frankfurt was published in 1591, the first one from Leipzig in 1605.
The historian Ulrich Rosseaux argues „to view the Messrelationen as a separate type of Early Modern media whose essential properties are the periodicity, respectability and compactness of its reports. From the perspective of their publishers, they acted as a continuously amended chronicle of the present and therefore a constitutive part of contemporaneous historiography.“
The Messrelationen, which encompassed on average 100 pages, drew their news from correspondents or newssheets. Often they contained reports by postmasters, merchants or travellers.