What Lessons for Economic Development Can We Draw from the Champagne Fairs?

(including criminal ones) without right of appeal, so long as they were not reserved for
the princely fair-wardens.⁵⁴ This church jurisdiction was of central importance, since
the core business of each fair was conducted on its cloth-trading days. The abbey
regarded its fair-jurisdiction as extremely important, conserved it jealously, and
repeatedly engaged in jurisdictional conflicts with the princely prévôt.⁵⁵

Security and contract-enforcement may have been the most important institutional
services provided by the counts of Champagne - or devolved to municipal or
ecclesiastical institutions - to support the fairs. But they were not the only ones. The
counts also provided infrastructure, loan guarantees, and constraints on local
merchants’ privileges, all of which contributed to the fairs’ success.

The counts made major contributions, both directly and indirectly, to commercial
infrastructure for merchants visiting the fairs. The counts erected fortifications around
the fair towns and roads connecting them, and built canals from the Seine into the fair-
town of Troyes.⁵⁶ The Hôtel-Dieu was founded in Provins around 1157-60 by the
count to expand accommodation for visiting merchants.⁵⁷ By granting concessions on
market dues, the counts mobilized other organizations, especially ecclesiastical ones,
to provide infrastructure for merchants in the form of accommodation, warehousing,
and selling space.⁵⁸ The counts also encouraged investment in fair infrastructure,
Terrasse argues, by granting burghers free rights to transact in real property, as shown
by numerous private transactions in property in the fair-zones as early as the twelfth
59
century.

The counts further facilitated the development of the fairs as money markets by
guaranteeing the security of loans merchants made at the fairs to creditors from whom
obtaining payment might be difficult because of high status or privileged legal
position. In 1221, for instance, the countess of Flanders and Hainaut borrowed a large
sum at the Champagne fairs, and a condition of the loan was that the count of
Champagne would ban Flemish and Hainaut merchants from his fairs if the countess

⁵⁴ Bourquelot (1865), II:24-5.

⁵⁵ Boutaric (1867), II:440 (#6764), 551 (#7394).

⁵⁶ Bourquelot (1865), I:62, 311; Bautier (1953), 108-12; Alengry (1915), 54.

⁵⁷ Bautier (1953), 112.

⁵⁸ Bautier (1953), 116.

⁵⁹ Terrasse (2005), 23-5.

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