Champagne fair-sergeants delivered a request for prosecution of a defaulting Sienese
merchant to the guild consuls in Siena, ‘the consuls immediately returned it to the
sergeant, telling him to carry it to the Podestà [chief town magistrate] because, they
said, he was greater and had more power’.147 A merchant trading at the fairs
sometimes asked his own political authorities back home to impose a collective
reprisal, but this involved penalties on his debtor’s compatriots in the home polity of
the creditor, not at the Champagne fairs.148 Community-based reprisals at the fairs
themselves were specifically outlawed, since one of the security guarantees the counts
of Champagne granted to merchants attending the fairs was freedom from all reprisals
except for those initiated by the fair-wardens as comital officials.
Far from being based on community jurisdiction, collective reprisals at the fairs were
based on princely jurisdiction and were thoroughly embedded in public legal
procedures. A fair-ban could only be imposed by the public authorities of Champagne
- i.e., by the princely fair-wardens, supported on appeal by the Jours de Troyes and
after 1285 by the Parlement de Paris. Contrary to the claim that the Champagne fair
authorities relinquished legal rights over merchants attending the fairs, the princely
fair-wardens explicitly claimed that they had authority over fair-debtors even when
such merchants had left Champagne, claiming in a letter of 1295, for example, that
‘these customs [of the fairs] supersede all other customs of all territories’.149 The
elaborate legal procedures which had to be followed before a fair-ban could even be
threatened indicate both how deeply the reprisal system was embedded in the formal
legal system, and how reluctant the Champagne authorities were actually to impose it,
conscious that the risk of reprisals could easily discourage international trade rather
than promote it.150
When a fair-ban was declared, it was imposed not on the merchants of a debtor’s
community, but rather on the merchants subject to a justice-system which had failed to
enforce a fair-debt. This is nicely illustrated by a case of 1299-1300, in which the
Champagne fair-wardens requested the lord mayor of London to arrest a Florentine
merchant for a debt of 1,600 livres tournois owed at the Champagne fairs to a
147 Zdekauer (1896), 354-9. We thank Mathieu Arnoux for bringing this case to our attention.
148 Bassermann (1911), 57-8.
149 Laurent (1935), 284.
150 Huvelin (1897), 430; Planitz (1919), 97, 168-90; Laurent (1935), 283-96.
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