The Enterprise of the Thurn and Taxis Family

The greatest credit for the development of a modern postal system in Europe, which later spread to the whole world, must go to the Thurn and Taxis family. When Emperor Maximilian I of Austria felt that it had become absolutely necessary for him to have permanent and reliable communications with all the distant parts of his Empire, the Italian nobleman Francesco de Tassis, called Torriani, offered to take care of the carriage of the Emperor’s letters from Vienna to Netherlands free of charge. In exchange he asked for the granting of a privilege of the exclusive use of this service for himself and his heirs. The postal route was opened on 18^th January 1505, and the imperial privilege was granted in 1516.

The first route led from Vienna to Brussels. Very soon Tassis stretched his routes from Brussels to France and Spain, and from Vienna to Milan, Mantua, Venice and Rome. In due course, subsidiary routes were linked to these main connections. Following the lines of the Roman cursus publicus, stations were established in the cities and their managers had to have horses ready and were responsible for the correct passage of the letter from one messenger to the other.

The descendants of Francesco de Tassis, who later changed their name to Thurn and Taxis, extended their postal network and tried to monopolise the postal service. Many rulers of the small German principalities through which the Taxis postal routes passed welcomed this service. Very often they tried to get their country included in the service. There were others, however, who had their own postal service and derived an income from it. Therefore they resisted the Taxis postal routes. The Thurn and Taxis family fought against the postal services of towns and guilds. Very often, blood was shed and messengers were held up and killed.

In the end, the Taxis family succeeded in establishing a continuous postal network, which was their monopoly. Towards the end of the sixteenth century this network covered almost the whole of continental Europe. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, when well-organised postal services of the individual countries were in existence, the postal services of Thurn and Taxis covered a territory of over twenty-five thousand square miles, with a population of about four million. In 1867, Prussia finally bought the remaining rights of the Thurn and Taxis family, and their postal network, which had existed for 362 years, disappeared.

On the territory of Austria proper the postal service was in the hands of another family of noblemen – the Paars.