Life in a Medieval City (28 page)

Sometimes a merchant borrows at one fair and promises to repay in installments at the next three or more, as he sells his goods. This sort of arrangement is taken care of in the closing days of the fair, during the debt settlement (
pagamentum
), a time of general liquidation of the promises to pay that have accumulated on all sides. Among other things, the system of dating loans from one fair to another helps solve the problem of variant calendars.
⁵
Venetian, Pisan, and Florentine merchants do not agree on when the year begins, or even what year it is.

An ever more complex financial system is taking shape. A merchant’s promise to pay may itself be sold at a discount, and a third party may appear at the subsequent fair to claim the debt. A merchant of Florence may buy a stock of cloth from a merchant of Ghent at the May Fair of Provins, and promise to pay twenty pounds at the Hot Fair of Troyes. The two take their “Letter of the Fair,” spelling out the agreement, to the Keeper of the Fair, and have it witnessed and sealed with the fair seal. The Fleming then has in his possession a negotiable piece of paper, which he may use to pay for his own purchases of pepper and cinnamon. The Letter of the Fair makes it possible to execute a considerable proportion of the fair’s business without recourse to the moneychangers, and without the need for handling large sums of cash.

Thus in the cheerful clamor of the fair, the jingle of silver is quietly being replaced by the rattle of the abacus and the scratching of the quill, turning bales and bolts into livres and deniers, and recording them in notarial documents.

Here, more than in anything else in this busy, knowledgeable, money-oriented city of shopkeepers, lies a portent of the future.

After 1250

T
he growing financial sophistication evident at the Hot Fair of Troyes in the year 1250 led in succeeding decades to a paradox not uncommon in history. The Champagne Fairs became so successful that they made themselves obsolescent.

Historians used to blame politics for the fourteenth-century decline of the fairs. The dynasty of Thibaut the Great came to an end with the marriage of Jeanne de Navarre, only surviving grandchild of Thibaut the Songwriter, to King Philip the Fair, whose taxes and wars were once believed to have ruined the fairs. But there was sufficient evidence of trouble before Philip. His predecessor in Champagne was an Englishman, Edmund of Lancaster, who married Jeanne’s widowed mother, Blanche of Artois. Edmund and Blanche raised taxes to a point where in Troyes’ sister city, Provins, the mayor sought to ease the burden of his fellow burghers by lengthening the weavers’ hours of labor. Workmen rioted and killed the mayor and several of his councillors. Repression and reprisal followed.

Social relations were growing complicated. The hallowed formula of three estates—clergy, nobility, and common folk—was never very realistic, even at the height of feudalism. By the late thirteenth century the “third estate” included bankers, engineers, salesmen, doctors, and poets along with peasants and proletarians. The topmost group of this class, the “patricians,” played a more and more active social and political role. While in cities like Provins they importuned their feudal lords to help them punish unruly workers, in other places they stoutly contested their lords’ rights to military service and aids. The refusal of Bourges to contribute to St.-Louis’ quixotic enterprise of 1270, upheld by the Parlement of Paris, gave the crusading business a final push into the grave.

But class war was not more responsible than taxes for the decline of the Champagne Fairs. An unparalleled school for banking, bookkeeping, and merchandising, the fairs helped kill themselves by nourishing more efficient methods of doing business. The grandson of the Italian businessman who struggled over the Alpine passes, at the head of his pack train, stayed home in his countinghouse and struggled over accounts. Traveling partners were replaced by permanent factors stationed in the principal cities of the north. (The Paris factor of the famous Bardi firm of Florence in the early fourteenth century had a bright son named Giovanni Boccaccio.) Ultimately the old overland route of the spice and cloth trade was itself superseded. As early as 1277 a venturesome Genoese galley rounded Gibraltar and crossed the stormy Bay of Biscay to the English Channel, though it was some time before shipping became safe enough to compete in cost with land transport. For shipments by both land and sea, the business tycoon of the fourteenth century took advantage of another new business technique—cargo insurance.

A variety of calamities, some natural and some man-made, befell Troyes, Champagne, and western Europe generally in the fourteenth century. Philip the Fair’s war with Flanders interrupted the fairs. Agriculture suffered a number of bad harvests, one in 1304 bringing famine in Troyes, and others affecting various regions in the 1320s. Edward III of England prepared for his expedition in quest of the crown of France by borrowing a quarter of a million pounds from Italian, Flemish, German, and English moneymen and then declaring bankruptcy, bringing ruin to the mighty firms of Bardi and Peruzzi. Finally the appalling catastrophe of the Black Death (1348–50) shook the entire agricultural and commercial structure of the West.

But even without war, famine and pestilence, there is reason to believe that the boom had temporarily run its course. Exactly what caused the slowdown of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries remains a mystery. Even if increasing taxes did not kill the Champagne Fairs, they may have contributed to the big depression. Some scholars point to the growth of monopolies. An example is the tanners of Troyes, who became rich and powerful by cartel buying and selling. Even more striking is the story of the butchers of Paris, who in 1260 acquired a perpetual lease on the twenty-five municipal butcher stalls of the city. In the course of a hundred years their number shrank to six families, none personally engaged in the trade, but all very wealthy and playing a major political role in the Hundred Years’ War.

In the second round of the war, starring Henry V and Joan of Arc, Troyes enjoyed a brief prominence, first in 1420 as the scene of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of France, consecrated in St.-Jean, and next in 1429 by Joan’s capture of the city
en route
to crowning the dauphin at Reims. But Troyes was on the downgrade. Though it remained a bishopric and continued to serve as a local center for commerce and manufacture, it had long ceased to be either a political capital or a nucleus of international trade. Paris, capital of a powerful central monarchy, took over as the major economic hub, growing to a metropolis of more than a hundred thousand by the end of the war (1453). London, capital of a rival kingdom and port for England’s growing wool-cloth industry, was not much smaller. Across the Channel, Antwerp, the best port on the coast, rode the crest of the new seaborne commerce, leaving behind the old cloth towns of Flanders—Ypres, Saint-Omer, Arras, Douai. In Germany, Hamburg and Lubeck, on either flank of the Danish peninsula, led the cities of the Hanseatic League on a brilliant career of commercial and political supremacy in the Baltic, monopolizing trade and fisheries, fighting wars with kings and collecting tolls.

In southern France some of the old cities (Avignon, Montpellier) declined, while others (Marseille, Lyon) held their own. In Italy, Florence rose to ever new heights under the leadership of a parvenu banking house, the Medici, as did Milan under the Visconti. Genoa crushed its ancient rival, Pisa, then met with difficulties in its turn and lost most of its far-flung colonial empire, though it remained a major financial center on the strength of its banking
savoir-faire
. With the downfall of its maritime rivals, Venice became the unchallenged queen of the Mediterranean, a position so glamorous that it was some time before Venetians became aware that the Mediterranean itself was losing importance through the opening of a sea route to the East and the discovery of a New World in the west. That the discovery was made by an experienced Genoese sailor, hired by the queen of the Atlantic maritime kingdom of Castile, was not surprising.

America had of course been discovered before, but Leif Ericson, Bjarni Herjulfson, and their companions brought along only the limited technology of the Old World’s tenth century. The difference between the Viking explorers and Columbus is the difference between the early and late Middle Ages. The Vikings had no wheeled plows, no felling axes, no iron harrows, no horse collars or horseshoes, no overshot waterwheels, no wealth of handicrafts to conciliate the aborigines, and no firearms (introduced in western Europe in the fourteenth century) to coerce them. Neither did they have the booming market for gold, silver, and furs that provided a lively stimulus for the Spaniards, English and French.

The Commercial Revolution, as modern scholars have named it, supplied the economic and technological basis for exploitation of the New World. At the same time it laid the foundations in mining and metallurgy, banking and merchandising, for the momentous developments in northwest Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The descendants of the craftsmen, merchants, and moneylenders of thirteenth-century France, England, Germany, and Flanders steadily augmented their power, toppling thrones, overturning churches, burying hallowed customs and taking over the privileges of the privileged classes. Without the Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, neither the French Revolution nor the Industrial Revolution is conceivable.

Like a number of other sleepy old towns, Troyes received a stimulus from the Industrial Revolution. It even regained a modicum of its ancient status, developing its own manufacturing specialty, knitwear, and winning the honorable title of leader of the nightcap industry. Its worst fire, in 1524, wiped out the rich and populous commercial quarter, lestroying the cloth halls, the Templar commandery, the Belfry (formerly the Viscount’s Tower), and seriously lamaging the churches of St.-Pantaléon, St.-Jean, and St.-Nicolas. Four and a half centuries of wear and tear, including he invasion of 1940 and the liberation of 1944, have further depleted the town’s medieval heritage. A few buildings weathered every rack, among them the Hôtel-Dieu-le-Comte, largely rebuilt, the Abbey of St.-Loup, which now houses a library and museums, and the cathedral with its stained glass. The “old quarter” of Troyes today, which includes the old fair quarter, actually dates from the rebuilding after the fire. Much of the original street layout remains: Cats’ Alley is still only seven feet wide, with the housetops leaning against each other.

An intangible relic also survives. Among such ancient professions as that of gem cutter, precious-metal worker, and apothecary, “Troy weight,” with its medieval ratio of twenty pennyweight to the ounce and twelve ounces to the pound, is still in use—a last souvenir of the great days of the Champagne Fairs.

Genealogy of the Counts of Champagne

Bibliography

General

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