By the late thirteenth century a visitor to the fairs in Champagne or Flanders could expect to find representatives of Italian business consortia bargaining with agents representing multiple northwest European wool producers and cloth manufacturers, drawing up contracts for payment schedules with debts to be cleared at future fairs months or even years in advance.28 Champagne’s fairs were not the only marketplaces of their sort—nearby Flanders also hosted large-scale exchanges in towns like Ypres, where a bustling cloth-making industry was emerging in the later Middle Ages.
