successful operation of an international fair, and were able to avoid selling privileges
to special interest-groups that would have limited trade.11
The first institutional service provided by the counts of Champagne consisted of
mechanisms for ensuring security of the persons and property rights of traders. The
counts undertook early, focused and comprehensive action to ensure the safety of
merchants travelling to and from the fairs, and were unusual among medieval fair-
authorities in devoting considerable political and military resources to extending this
guarantee beyond their territorial boundaries.12 As early as 1148, when
moneychangers from Vézelay were robbed on their way to the Provins fair by a
French nobleman, Count Thibault II wrote to the regent of France demanding that the
moneychangers be compensated and declaring, ‘I will not let take place with impunity
such an injury, which tends to nothing less than the ruin of my fairs’.13 In 1149, when
another French nobleman seized the goods of merchants travelling to the Champagne
fairs, the count wrote again to the French regent demanding justice, saying ‘if you
wish to chastise him and march against him with an army, let me know: I will assist
you in extracting vengeance from him’.14 By the early thirteenth century, the counts
were negotiating formal treaties from neighbouring princes to guarantee safe conduct
to visitors to ‘their’ fairs - in 1209 with France, in 1220 with Burgundy, and in 1232
with Boulogne.15 Before mid-century, the counts were extending the geographical
scope of the safe conduct as far afield as Italy. In 1242-3, when some Italian
merchants travelling to the Champagne fairs were kidnapped and robbed in Italy by
Piacenzans, the count of Champagne wrote to the Piacenzan authorities threatening to
ban all Piacenzan merchants from his fairs unless the victims were compensated.16 As
early as the 1170s, the counts had begun appointing special ‘fair-wardens’ with
policing, regulatory and jurisdictional powers at the fairs, and by the mid-thirteenth
century they had empowered these wardens to exert pressure on foreign jurisdictions
to enforce the safe conduct of the fairs.17 In 1283-5, for instance, when a Artois toll-
11 Chapin (1937).
12 Bautier (1953), 117-18; Laurent (1935), 258-9.
13 Bourquelot (1865), I:32 324-5; Goldschmidt (1891), 229 n. 153.
14 Bourquelot (1865), I:324-5; Arbois de Jubainville and Pigeotte (1859-66), II:388.
15 Bourquelot (1865), I:174. See Evergates (2010), 47-51 (#18-22) for instances of enforcement dating
from 1217.
16 Bourquelot (1865), I, 178-9.
17 Bourquelot (1865), I:180; Laurent (1935), 259, 295-7, 303-04.