Huguenots, blacksmiths and gypsies: mobility, pseudo-events and fake news in sixteenth-century Lombardy

On the 26th of April 1576, a scary day shakes Lombardy. Many people say that gangs of French Protestants (the so-called Huguenots) are descending to destroy and rob as much as possible. Mobilization is general. Within hours the countryside is on high alert, and the sound of hammer bells rips through the emotions. The news spread like wildfire through the country: from Cremona to Como, from Bergamo to Melegnano, people experience a state of terror and insecurity, but the rumors concerning the event reached as far as Turin and Rome. Only when people discover that this agitation was nothing more than an echo of the violent expulsion of a group of gypsies out of the territory of Cremona, tempers start to calm down. But for a day the latent fears of people of different social levels – the fear of vagrants, brigands, or of a conspiracy – deflagrated because of this liminal event. Starting from the chronicle of two Lombard goldsmiths, the dissertation aims at tracing the reasons why and the means through which this pseudo-event propagated so quickly and so widely. This curious case of Lombard's history will therefore be used as a litmus test to analyze how fake news profoundly influenced the actions of both crowds and political élites in early modern Italy.