French textile centres rather than at the fairs. From this he concludes that by 1262 the
fairs had already begun to decline as merchandise markets.71
But these Italians’ visits to textile centres in 1262 can only be interpreted as evidence
of decline if we have evidence that Italian merchants frequenting the fairs had never
visited textile centres in the pre-1262 period. There is no such evidence: what we
observe in 1262 may have been standard practice. Furthermore, Bautier’s conclusion
does not take account of the fact that in 1262 Flemish merchants had decided not to
visit the fairs because they had been maltreated by the customs collector at Bapaume,
the toll-station they were legally obliged to pass on their way to Champagne.72 Italian
merchants could well have been purchasing cloth directly in Flanders in 1262 in
response to this temporary Flemish boycott, rather than because the fairs were already
in decline as merchandise markets.
By contrast, Bautier’s two documents reveal clear differences between 1262 and 1320.
In 1262, the Italian merchants buying cloth in textile centres were still bringing it to
the Champagne fairs before shipping it to Italy. This suggests that in the 1260s the
Italian merchants still treated the fairs as their main base for the cloth trade even when
they obtained the cloth in other places. In 1320, by contrast, the cloth purchased was
neither bought at the Champagne fairs nor dispatched from them; only the finance was
arranged there.73 If Bautier’s two documents show anything, therefore, it is not that
decline had already started in 1262, but that it intervened sometime between then and
1320.
Additional evidence casts doubt on the idea that by the 1260s the merchandising
operations at the fairs were in decline and only the financial business survived. For
one thing, this claim would imply that merchants attending the fairs after 1260 were
specialist financiers with little interest in merchandise trade. But Bassermann shows
that ‘almost all the Italian firms - with the exception of the Romans - which played a
decisive role on the money-market [at the Champagne fairs] were also present in the
71 Bautier (1953), 133-5.
72 Bourquelot (1865), I:195; Boutaric (1867), I:50 (#559); Finot (1894), 26-7, 179-86.
73 Bautier (1953), 133-5.
12