enforcement played a central role in the growth of international trade during the
medieval Commercial Revolution.
6. Conclusion
The medieval Champagne fairs do hold lessons for the institutional foundations of
impersonal exchange and long-distance trade, but not those for which they have often
been mobilized. For one thing, they provide no support for the view that international
trade developed on the basis of private-order legal provision. There were no ‘private
judges’ at the Champagne fairs. Rather, the Champagne fairs offered an effective
combination of state, ecclesiastical, and municipal courts, among which foreign
merchants could (and did) shop around. This system was supplemented by a dedicated
fair court, but its judges, the fair-wardens, were also princely officials and did not
prevent foreign merchants from enforcing contracts at other levels of the princely
justice-system, in front of courts operated by local abbeys, and in municipal courts.
Nor do the Champagne fairs support the idea that long-distance trade could develop on
the basis of contract enforcement offered by collective reprisals among corporative
communities of businessmen, in the absence of impartial public contract-enforcement.
The role of merchant ‘communities’ at the Champagne fairs was minimal. No
merchants had them for the first 60 years of the fairs; many important groups of
merchants at the fairs never had them at all; and even the few groups that did have
them in later phases of the fairs’ existence could only use them for internal contract
enforcement and relied on the public legal system to enforce contracts between
merchants of different communities. Collective reprisals were used in a limited way in
the final phase of the fairs’ ascendancy, after c. 1260, but they were fully integrated
into the formal legal system, their enforcement relied on state coercion, and the few
merchant ‘communities’ at the fairs played no role in initiating or implementing them.
What the Champagne fairs do show is that the policies and actions undertaken by the
public authorities were crucial to impersonal exchange and international trade in
medieval Europe. Between the 1180s and the 1290s, the rulers of Champagne
provided security and contract enforcement to all merchants regardless of community
affiliation: long-distance trade flourished and the Champagne fairs became the fulcrum
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