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

merchandise trade’.⁷⁴ Sayous, too, notes that the Italians who frequented the
Champagne fairs traded in both merchandise and money rather than specializing in
one or the other.⁷⁵ Blomquist reaches a similar conclusion for the Lucchese at the
fairs.⁷⁶ In the absence of specialization in financial business by Italians at the fairs
between 1260 and 1320, it is difficult to see how the merchandise trade could have
declined from 1260 onwards while the fairs remained a prosperous international
financial market.

Notarial documents from Genoa and Marseilles, moreover, reveal a diametrically
opposite trajectory in the merchandise trade at the Champagne fairs. Doehaerd’s study
of Genoese notarial registers finds that the merchandise trade between Genoa and the
fairs shows a marked recrudescence starting around 1250; she concludes that it
remained lively until at least 1300.⁷⁷ Face’s study of notarial documents from Genoa
and Marseilles shows a ‘truly huge scale participation of the merchants from the
northern Italian cities in the caravan trade with Champagne throughout the last three
quarters of the thirteenth century’. He concludes that ‘while it would ... be erroneous
to assume that these Italians played no part in the fair trade prior to the second quarter
of that century, our evidence does indicate that their activity was much more intensive
from that time forward’.⁷⁸ Notarial archives thus show the merchandise trade to the
Champagne fairs from Italy and Provence increasing, not decreasing, after c. 1250.

Additional evidence inconsistent with the notion of a declining merchandise trade at
the fairs after 1260 is provided by the fact that Montpellier, the most important
Provençal town trading with the fairs, continued to negotiate treaties with seigneurs on
the Rhone river to clear a path for its merchants to ship merchandise to the
Champagne fairs, signing a treaty to that effect with the count of Valence and the
seigneurs of Montelimar in 1265.⁷⁹ As late as 1295, Italian merchants requested an
extension of the period during which Flemish merchants displayed their cloths at the

⁷⁴ Bassermann (1911), 87-8.

⁷⁵ Sayous (1932), 20.

⁷⁶ Blomquist (1985), 523.

⁷⁷ Doehaerd (1941), 212, 216.

⁷⁸ Face (1957), 170.

⁷⁹ Alengry (1915), 152.

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