Late Middle Ages

The Champagne fairs and medieval long-distance trade

For more than a century, from roughly 1180 to 1320, the six fairs of the county of Champagne — Lagny-sur-Marne, Bar-sur-Aube, Provins, Troyes, Bar-sur-Seine, and L’Isle-sous-Ré — were the principal international mart of the Latin West. They were, in the most literal sense, the clearing-house of the long-distance trade between the Mediterranean, the Low Countries, the British Isles, the Rhineland, and the Baltic. The Florentine, Lucchese, Sienese, and Venetian merchants came with alum from Phocaea, silk from Constantinople and the Levant, dyestuffs (kermes from the Latin East, woad from Toulouse, madder from Flanders and the Levant), and the southern spices. The Flemish cloth towns of Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges came with the broadcloths of the draperie of Flanders and with the sayetterie of Hondschoote and the surrounding villages. The English merchants of the Cinque Ports, of London, of Boston, of Lynn, of Southampton, came with the great sacks of the Lincolnshire Lindsey, of the Cotswolds, of the Herefordshire Ledbury, of the Sussex downland. The Hanseatic merchants of Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Wisby, and Riga came with furs from Russia, wax and honey from the eastern Baltic, copper and iron from Sweden, and the herring and the stockfish of the North Sea. The Spanish merchants of Burgos, of Barcelona, of Valencia, of Bilbao came with the iron of the Basque provinces, the salt of the Atlantic coast, the oil of Andalusia, the saffron of La Mancha, and the leather of Cordoba.

The fairs were, in the most literal sense, the place where the trade of the meridional and the septentrional Europe met. The two halves of European trade had been, in the early Middle Ages, largely independent; the Venetian and Genoese trade with the Levant and the Byzantine world on the one side, and the Flemish and English and Hanseatic trade of the Atlantic and the Baltic on the other, did not, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, have a regular meeting-place. The fairs of Champagne provided that meeting-place, and the institution of the six fairs — each held twice a year, in a rotating sequence that brought the same merchants to the same place at the same time, in a year-long cycle of credit, settlement, and reinvestment — was the institutional innovation of the high medieval commercial revolution.

The Geography of the Six Fairs

The county of Champagne, the territory of the counts of Champagne (the comté de Champagne) and, after 1274, of the kings of France, was, in the twelfth century, the most powerful principality of the north-eastern French kingdom. The county straddled the great trade routes that linked the English Channel and the Low Countries to the Rhône-Saône corridor and the Mediterranean, and the count of Champagne was, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, a major figure in the politics of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, the Latin Empire of Constantinople, and the kingdom of France. The foire de Lagny, the foire de Bar-sur-Aube, the foire de Provins, the foire de Troyes, the foire de Bar-sur-Seine, the foire de L’Isle-sous-Ré — these were the six fairs of the cycle, each lasting for some weeks, each held in a town that was the residence of a count or of a vicomte, each presided over by a garde de la foire, an officer of the count, who had the power of the garde des foires and the justice de la foire.

The sequence of the fairs mattered. The merchant who had sold his cloth at the foire de Lagny in January could carry the proceeds to the foire de Bar-sur-Aube in March, and so on through the cycle. The Bourse of the foire de Provins was, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the principal place of credit and of exchange. The foire was, in this sense, both a marché (a place of sale) and a bourse (a place of credit). The principal goods of the fairs — English wool, Flemish broadcloth, Italian silk, southern spices, alum from Phocaea, kermes and woad, furs and wax and honey from the Baltic — were sold on the marché of the fair; the proceeds were carried on the books of the bourse of the fair, and the bills of exchange drawn on the next fair of the cycle were the principal instruments of credit.

The work of Robert-Henri Bautier, of John H. Munro, of Edwin S. Hunt, of Robert Sabatino Lopez, of Harry Miskimin, of David Abulafia, of John Day, of Wendy Davies, of Erik Aerts, of Peter Stabel, of the late Jean-Pierre Molénat, of the late Robert Fossier, of the late Marc Venard, of the late Jean-Pierre Bénoit, of the late Robert Stallo is the principal monument. The new commercial history of the fairs has been transformed by the systematic work on the cartulaires of the counts of Champagne, of the foire of Provins, of the foire of Lagny, of the foire of Troyes, of the foire of Bar-sur-Aube, of the foire of Bar-sur-Seine, of the foire of L’Isle-sous-Ré.

The Bills of Exchange and the Italian Credit

The fairs of Champagne were, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the principal site of the new instruments of international credit: the lettera di cambio, the billet de change, the bill of exchange. The bill of exchange was, in its essentials, a simple instrument: a merchant who had sold goods at the foire de Provins in September and who wished to pay a debt in, say, Florence in December, would draw a bill on a correspondent in Florence, payable in December, for the amount in Florentine florins. The correspondent would, in December, pay the creditor in Florence; the merchant would, in September at the foire de Provins, pay the correspondent the amount in livres tournois, plus a small fee (the cambio, the agio) for the service. The bill of exchange allowed the merchant to avoid the transport of bullion, allowed the correspondent to earn a small fee, and allowed the two fairs of the cycle to settle the balances.

The principal users of the lettera di cambio at the fairs of Champagne were the Italian banking houses — the Riccardi of Lucca, the Ballardi of Lucca, the Pessagno of Genoa, the Bardi, the Peruzzi, the Acciaiuoli, the Frescobaldi, the Mozzi, the Pazzi. The Italian houses had correspondents at all six fairs of the cycle, and they were the principal banchieri di cambio of the fairs. The work of Edwin S. Hunt, of Raymond de Roover, of John H. Munro, of Robert Sabatino Lopez, of Harry Miskimin, of Armando Sapori, of Federigo Melis, of the late David Abulafia, of the late Jean-Pierre Molénat, of the late Robert Stallo has, in two generations, recovered the lettera di cambio as a documentary and an institutional object.

The fairs of Champagne were, in this sense, the principal bourse of the Latin West in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the instruments that they had created — the lettera di cambio, the foire as bourse, the Italian banking presence in the north, the Hanseatic presence in the south — became, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the institutions of the new commercial geography. The fairs themselves, deprived of the clearing function, declined. The Italian banks continued to operate from the great Italian cities and the Atlantic ports; the Hanseatic League consolidated its position in the Baltic and the North Sea; the English wool and Flemish cloth trades found new centres at Bruges, Antwerp, and the London Stalhof; the great fairs of the south — Lyon, Geneva, Beaucaire, Medina del Campo — replaced the foires de Champagne as the principal international marts of the late-medieval long-distance trade.

The Decline of the Fairs

The fairs of Champagne were, by 1320, a memory. The principal causes of the decline were four. The first was the contraction of the Italian merchant presence. By 1280, the great Italian banks — the Riccardi, the Ballardi, the Pessagno, and a generation of Pisan and Genoese firms — were moving their capital out of the Champagne circuit and into the Italian cities themselves, and into the Atlantic ports: Bruges, Antwerp, Genoa, Pisa, Venice, Lyon, Barcelona. The bill of exchange, the principal instrument of the fairs, became a clearing instrument of the great Italian banks operating from their own cities, and the foire lost its function as the international clearing-house.

The second was the rise of the Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic merchants of Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Wisby, Riga, Danzig, and Rostock had been marginal visitors to the Champagne fairs in the early thirteenth century; by 1300, they had a regular and permanent presence in the North Sea and the Baltic, and the Hanse had its own Kontor at Bruges, which became, in the early fourteenth century, the principal clearing-house of the Baltic and the North Sea trade. The decline of the Champagne fairs and the rise of the Bruges market were, in this sense, two sides of the same movement.

The third was the war. The Foedera, the principal diplomatic and treaty instrument of the English and French crowns, became, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a more frequent and a more elaborate instrument, and the war between England and France — the Guerre de Cent Ans of 1337–1453 — cut the overland trade routes through the Île-de-France and the Champagne. The foire of Lagny and the foire of Troyes were, after 1337, in the path of armies, and the merchants of the fairs moved to the more secure markets of the Rhine (Cologne, Frankfurt, Mainz) and the southern fairs (Lyon, Geneva, Beaucaire).

The fourth was the demographic and economic crisis. The Great Famine of 1315–1317, the pestis secunda of 1361, the pestis tertia of 1369, the Black Death of 1347–1351, the long demographic recession of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — all depressed the long-distance trade and reduced the number of merchants travelling the fairs. The fairs were, in the end, the victim of their own success: the institutions that they had created — the lettera di cambio, the foire as bourse, the Italian banking presence in the north, the Hanseatic presence in the south — became, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the institutions of the new commercial geography, and the fairs themselves were left without a function.

The Merchants’ Manuals

The fairs of Champagne are also the documentary source of one of the most important genres of late-medieval commercial literature: the Practica della mercatura — the merchant’s manual — the practical handbook of the merchant, the cambium, the mercatura, the artis mercatoriae, the artis negotiatorum, the artis mercatorum, the artis negotiantis, the artis negotiantium, the artis negotiantum, the artis mercatorum. The Practica della mercatura of Francesco Balducci Pegolotti of Florence, written c. 1340 and preserved in the Magliabechiana of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Ms. II.IV.68), is the most famous: it describes the weights, measures, and currencies of all the major commercial cities of the period, from London to Beijing. The Tarifa of the cambium of Pegolotti, the Pratica di mercatura of Giovanni da Uzzano, the Tariffa of the cambium of Florence, the Tariffa of the cambium of Venice, the Tariffa of the cambium of Genoa — are the documentary record of the international long-distance trade. The work of Armando Sapori, of Federigo Melis, of the late David Abulafia, of the late Jean-Pierre Molénat, of the late Robert Stallo has, in two generations, recovered the Practica della mercatura as a documentary and an institutional object.

Reading the Fairs

The historiography of the fairs of Champagne has been, in many respects, the historiography of the late-medieval European long-distance trade. The work of Robert-Henri Bautier, of John H. Munro, of Edwin S. Hunt, of Robert Sabatino Lopez, of Harry Miskimin, of David Abulafia, of John Day, of Wendy Davies, of Erik Aerts, of Peter Stabel, of the late Jean-Pierre Molénat, of the late Robert Fossier, of the late Marc Venard, of the late Jean-Pierre Bénoit, of the late Robert Stallo is the principal monument. The new commercial history of the fairs has been transformed by the systematic work on the cartulaires of the counts of Champagne, on the Compte des foires preserved in the Archives départementales of the Aube and the Marne, on the registres de la garde of the foires, and on the livres de raison of the great Italian merchant families of Prato, Florence, and Lucca.

References and Further Reading

  • Robert-Henri Bautier, Les foires de Champagne (1988).
  • John H. Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the ‘Financial Revolution’: The Usury Prohibition and the Commercial Revolution,” in The Usury Debate (2003) and his many articles on the Champagne fairs, the Flemish cloth trade, and the Anglo-Hanse trade.
  • Edwin S. Hunt, The Medieval Super-Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence (1994).
  • Robert Sabatino Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (1971) and The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance (1970).
  • Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe: A Case Study in the 14th and 15th Centuries (1969) and Cash, Credit and Crisis in the Middle Ages (1989).
  • David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011).
  • Armando Sapori, Le marchand italien au Moyen Âge (1952) and his editions of the Libre di conti of the Prato merchant companies.