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



1. Introduction

The Champagne fairs were a cycle of periodic trade fairs held annually from the
twelfth century onwards. They took place six times a year and rotated among four
towns - Bar-sur-Aube, Lagny, Provins and Troyes - located in the county of
Champagne, a polity enjoying extensive internal autonomy until its incorporation into
France in 1285. Each fair lasted for about six weeks, followed by a break for
merchants to move on to the next fair, so the Champagne fair-cycle constituted an
almost continuous market throughout the year, a notable advantage over most other
medieval fairs.1 Although merchants from many countries traded many goods at the
Champagne fairs, the core business was the exchange of cloth and wool brought by
Flemish and French traders for spices and luxuries brought by Italian and Provençal
merchants. The Italian presence also fostered financial sophistication, and the fairs
increasingly attracted international payment and exchange services. The Champagne
fairs operated as the undisputed fulcrum of international exchange in Europe for much
of the thirteenth century.

Their early success and international importance have made the Champagne fairs a
standard-bearer of the medieval Commercial Revolution, from which many scholars
draw lessons about the institutional basis for impersonal exchange and long-distance
trade. Historians view the Champagne fairs as central to debates about the factors
influencing commercial growth in medieval Europe.2 Economists draw lessons from
the medieval Champagne fairs for modern developing economies, some using them to
urge the merits of private-order contract-enforcement and the unimportance of public
legal mechanisms,3 while others claim that the fairs show that collective reprisals
among corporative communities of businessmen can sustain impersonal exchange.4

The Champagne fairs thus play a central role in the analysis of the institutional
foundations of market-based economic activity. So it is important to establish what the
evidence shows about the causes of their success. The only full-length studies of the

1 Bautier (1953), 113.

2 Alengry (1915), 13-17, 72-84; Bautier (1953), 143-4; Bloch (1964), 86-7; Braudel (1979), 3:93;
Braudel (1981), 419; Chapin (1937), 13; De Roover (1948), 11-12; Laurent (1935); Munro (2001), 14-
16; Pirenne (1936), 100-03.

3 Milgrom, North and Weingast (1990).

4 Greif (2006a), 100, 315, 317, 333, 336.



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