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



begun to decline as a market for international trade in merchandise from 1260, so the
restrictions on Flemish cloth-merchants’ ability to attend the fairs from 1297 onwards
cannot have played a major role in the business of the fairs.94 But, as we have shown,
Bautier’s premise that trade in merchandise began to decline from 1260 cannot be
sustained: the merchandise trade at the Champagne fairs continued to thrive until at
least the 1290s.

Bautier’s second reason to reject the role of the war is his contention that as early as
1294 Flemish cloth comprised only 20 per cent of the value of cloth sold at the fairs,
and hence restrictions on Flemish merchants cannot have had a major impact.95 The
figure of 20 per cent comes from Bautier’s analysis of cloth purchased at the fairs by a
single Sienese company in 1294.96 Closer analysis of this document, however, reveals
Bautier’s calculations to be misleading. Bautier excludes cloth from Douai, Lille and
Orchies, but in 1294 these three towns were Flemish, not French: they were
surrendered to France in 1305 by the Treaty of Athis-sur-Orge which ended the
Franco-Flemish war of 1302-05. Hence cloth purchased from these three towns must
be included when calculating the proportion originating from Flanders in 1294. This
recalculation shows that Flemish cloth comprised 40 per cent of the value of cloth
purchased at the Champagne fairs by this Sienese firm in 1294. The exclusion from
the fairs at various points from 1297 onwards of a group of merchants that provided
two-fifths of the value of cloth sold in 1294 must have had a major adverse impact on
the attractiveness of the fairs to other merchants.

The only two reasons for rejecting the Franco-Flemish conflicts as a cause of the fairs’
decline are thus not convincing. By contrast, the positive evidence in favour of this
thesis is striking. The conflicts between France and Flanders began in 1297 as a
consequence of an alliance between Flanders and England against France, and almost
immediately had a direct impact on the Champagne fairs. On 2 January 1297, at the
opening of the Lagny fair (the first in the annual Champagne cycle), French royal
officials arrested all Flemish merchants, confiscated their goods, and sold the
merchandise to profit the royal exchequer. Although Flemish merchants

94 Bautier (1953), 140-2.

95 Bautier (1953), 141.

96 Bautier (1947), 91-2.

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