from the fairs.134 This threat of collective reprisals, he argues, made merchants’
communal courts force defaulters to fulfill their contracts.
But is it true that the Champagne fair authorities relinquished legal rights over visiting
merchants and permitted them to be subject solely to the laws of their own
communities?135 It is not. Merchants from a wide array of different European cities
and territories were frequenting the Champagne fairs by the 1180s at latest, as we have
seen. For the ensuing sixty years or more, all visiting merchants were subject to the
public legal system - princely, municipal, and ecclesiastical - prevailing at the fairs. It
was not until 1245 that the count of Champagne issued a charter stating that
those Roman, Tuscan, Lombard and Provençal merchants who would like to
dwell in his [the count’s] house in the lower town of Provins at the St Ayoul
fairs are granted all liberty for their persons and goods, such that no-one may
lay hand on any of them, unless in such a fashion as is entailed by law and the
customs of the fairs, and except for the payment of regular dues on buying and
selling; he [the count] dispenses them from responding, outside the compound
of the house, to the fair-wardens and to the bailli, submitting them uniquely to
his own justice or, in case of his absence, to the governor charged with
replacing him.136
The count thus exempted this subset of visiting merchants from judgment by his bailli
and fair-wardens, but only by bringing them under his direct jurisdiction. He neither
relinquished legal rights over them nor subjected them to the laws of their own
communities.
Around the same time, particular groups of Italian and Provençal merchants
frequenting the fairs began to appoint consuls, some of whom later came to exercise
jurisdiction over disputes between members of that particular group of merchants. The
first reference to any foreign merchant consul at the Champagne fairs was for the
Sienese in 1246.137 Consuls for another fifteen Italian cities whose merchants
frequented the Champagne fairs were mentioned in the course of the second half of the
134 Greif (2002), 185.
135 Greif (2006a), 227
136 Bourquelot (1865), 174.
137 Bautier (1953), 126.
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