to imposing a fair-ban had they not held some expectation of success. Hence it is
reasonable to view the fair-ban procedure as having made some contribution to the
ability of the Champagne fair-wardens to enforce merchant contracts, despite its
recognized limitations.
But collective reprisals cannot have been the crucial contract-enforcement mechanism
underlying the ascendancy of the Champagne fairs, since there is no evidence that fair-
bans were used to enforce merchant contracts in the period 1180-1260. There are only
two mentions of fair-bans from the period before 1260: one in 1221 where the creditor
was a sovereign prince and thus extraordinary ‘diplomatic’ guarantees were needed;
and the other in 1242-3, which was to penalize violation of a safe conduct rather than a
commercial contract.162 The Champagne fairs thus flourished as the undisputed
fulcrum of European international trade for eighty years, between c. 1180 and c. 1260,
without using collective reprisals to enforce contracts.
This raises the question of what mechanism operated before 1260 to prevent fair-
debtors from defaulting? A possible answer is that the Champagne fairs, as the most
important international market in Europe, were the source of profitable trading
opportunities that could not be replicated elsewhere. As we have seen, the fairs offered
princely, municipal, and ecclesiastical courts with powers to compel merchants to
fulfill contractual obligations while they were in Champagne. The only way a
defaulting debtor could avoid prosecution was to avoid the fairs permanently, losing
profitable trading opportunities. Provided that the benefit of absconding was lower
than the cost of sacrificing future trading opportunities at the fairs, a merchant had an
incentive to pay his debts. If this condition was met for the majority of merchants, then
the combination of profitable trading opportunities and an effective legal system with
coercive powers provides an explanation for why merchants at the Champagne fairs
typically paid their debts rather than defaulting. The use of the fair-ban procedure
against absconding debtors after 1260 may have provided an additional deterrent
against default, but cannot have constituted the main reason why debts were typically
paid. The Champagne fair-bans thus do not support the view that corporative contract
162 Bourquelot (1865), I:178-9, 193-4, 327-8.
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