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



Bautier’s second explanation for the fairs’ decline is the development of cloth
production in Italy. Italians had purchased cloth from Flanders and other northwest
European industrial centres at the Champagne fairs until the end of the thirteenth
century, Bautier argues, but from the beginning of the fourteenth century Italy itself
began to produce cloth for export, and Milanese and Florentine cloth producers
competed successfully with the Flemish, so Italian merchants no longer needed to go
to the Champagne fairs for cloth.90 But as Munro points out, the key changes in Italian
textile production date only from the 1320s, too late to explain a decline of the
Champagne fairs by 1315, let alone by Bautier’s favoured date of 1260.91

Why, then, were the Champagne fairs still flourishing as markets for merchandise and
finance as late as the mid-1290s but in serious decline by c. 1315? The answer resides
in a reversal of the very factors that had favoured the fairs’ ascendancy in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries - the policies pursued by the public authorities. Until 1285,
Champagne was ruled by the counts of Champagne who, although formally vassals of
France, in practice administered the county internally with virtual autonomy.92 In
1274, the last count died and his minor daughter was betrothed to the son of the
French king, whose majority in 1285 saw the annexation of Champagne to France.93
The new French King, Philip IV, was ambitious to centralize the French monarchy and
expand its military and fiscal capacities. The tactics he used - war with Flanders,
despoiling and excluding Flemish merchants, arresting and taxing Italian merchants,
and barring exports of raw wool and undyed cloth from France - all affected trade at
the Champagne fairs within 15 years of their coming under French governance.

Conflicts between France and Flanders restricted the ability of Flemish merchants to
attend the fairs, confiscatory taxation and incarceration encumbered and deterred
Italian merchants from operating in France, and prohibitions on the export of wool and
woollen cloth reduced the attractiveness of the fairs to all.

Bautier recognized that the Franco-Flemish conflicts at the end of the thirteenth
century damaged the Champagne fairs, but gave two reasons for concluding that they
were not the main cause of the fairs’ decline. One was his claim that the fairs had

90 Bautier (1953), 143.
91 Munro (2001), 419-24.
92 Alengry (1915), 48, 66, 68.
93 Bautier (1953), 118.

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