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

from French producers to ban the export of raw wool, unfinished woollen cloth, and
even the raw materials for dyeing, culminating in the royal export prohibition in 1303,
which remained in force until 1360, apart from the single year of 1315.¹⁰⁷ In the early
fourteenth century, therefore, the policies of the French state not only restricted the
supply of Flemish cloth to the fairs but also prevented the Italian demand for raw wool
and cloths at the fairs from being met. Since the cloth trade was a central component
of economic activity at the Champagne fairs, these restrictions severely affected the
prosperity of the fairs, and thus explain why they were in serious decline by 1315.

The decline of the Champagne fairs that had set in by 1310-15 resulted, as noted
above, in a set of proposals for reform presented to the king of France around 1315-22,
and from then on the French crown enacted repeated ordinances in attempts to revive
the fairs.¹⁰⁸ But these policies failed, not least because they continued to mandate
export restrictions on wool, a key component of the fairs’ trade during their
ascendancy. If the Italians could not obtain the indispensable English wool at the
Champagne fairs, they would go elsewhere for it - to Flanders or to England itself -
and that is what they did.¹⁰⁹ The last important group of Italian merchants left the fairs
in 1350, after which the Champagne fairs retained only regional significance.¹¹⁰

A further reason the decline of the fairs that had begun by 1315 proved to be
irreversible was, in Munro’s graphic phrase, the ‘spreading stain’ of warfare in Europe
which greatly increased the costs of overland trade.¹¹¹ The resumption of the Guelph-
Ghibelline wars in Italy from 1313 to 1343 greatly increased risks on the overland
route from Genoa to the Champagne fairs, as shown by the declaration of a non-
Genoese Italian merchant before a Genoese notary in 1327 explaining why he had
been compelled to remain for so long in the city.¹¹² Civil war broke out in Flanders
between 1323 and 1328, and the Hundred Years War (a civil war over the French
throne) began in 1337. These military events meant that European overland trade
contracted dramatically during the fourteenth century. The final demise of the
Champagne fairs in the mid-fourteenth century cannot, therefore, be attributed wholly

¹⁰⁷ Bourquelot (1865), I, 212-4; Schulte (1900), 346.

¹⁰⁸ Bourquelot (1865), II, 308-9.

¹⁰⁹ Schulte (1900), 346-8.

¹¹⁰ Bautier (1953), 137.

¹¹¹ Munro (2001), 14.

¹¹² Doehaerd (1941), 227.

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