Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City currently surging to top-tier status among the Democratic presidential primary candidates, has found something new to spend his money on. According to the New York Times, the diminutive sugar hater “has contracted some of the biggest meme-makers on the internet to post sponsored content on Instagram promoting his presidential campaign.” It’s an abundantly silly story, filled with nonsense words and phrases such as “primary liaison with the meme community,” “grapejuiceboys,” and “a powerful force in the influencer economy.”
Stupid neologisms aside, employing people among the hoi polloi to spread positive words about you to the great unwashed is a time-honored tradition among the rich. In medieval England, criers (or “bellmen”) were tasked with spreading word of royal proclamations. “Don’t shoot the messenger” carried the force of law.
The town crier draws on an even earlier method of promulgation, the bardic tradition. Lords across Europe and beyond paid bards to tell great tales and poems of their goodness and mercy or to sing songs of their mighty victories and military prowess. Think Paul Bettany’s medieval hype-man character of Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale or the minstrel Jaskier singing the exploits of Geralt of Rivia in Netflix’s The Witcher.
These bards were also routinely employed to slander opposing lords and patrons. During the early 17th century, following the Tudor conquest of Ireland, the petty, polemical back-and-forth between Irish court bards escalated to a yearslong controversy known as “the Contention of the Bards,” or Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh, in Irish. (The disputation and its players are too intricate to recount here, but imagine an ancestral family feud in the form of a Gaelic rap battle.)
Kings and patrons also hired historians and men of letters to write hagiographic histories favorable to their rule or lineage. Niccolo Machiavelli, for instance, wrote his Florentine Histories at the behest of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, who commissioned the work and expected an account favorable of his family’s deeds. As such, Machiavelli was forced to employ a cunning rhetorical strategy to critique the family that had deprived his native city of its liberty, damning with faint praise and putting condemnations into others’ mouths and contexts. Sure beats memes.
