Europe · The early medieval west
County of Champagne
10th century–1284/1314
Comté de Champagne; capital Troyes (from campania, "open country"). Under counts such as Hugh I, Theobald II and Henry I "the Liberal" it became one of the wealthiest and most cultured French principalities.
- Existed
- 10th century–1284/1314
- Shown on the map
- AD 990–1027, 1040–1065, 1094–1125, 1152–1284 (4 periods)
- Peak area
- 27k km²
- Region
- Europe
Overview
Comté de Champagne; capital Troyes (from campania, "open country"). Under counts such as Hugh I, Theobald II and Henry I "the Liberal" it became one of the wealthiest and most cultured French principalities. Its supreme importance was economic: the Champagne fairs (Troyes, Provins, Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube) were the pre-eminent hub of European commerce in the 12th–13th centuries. UNESCO's World Heritage dossier for Provins describes it as "a clearing house for world economy at the time," a town whose fairs made it "a nerve centre of European trade" over two centuries, where Flemish cloth met Italian goods and where modern credit and exchange techniques developed. The court patronized literature — Chrétien de Troyes, pioneer of Arthurian romance, wrote there. Count Theobald IV inherited the Kingdom of Navarre (1234), uniting the two under the House of Blois-Champagne. The county came to the crown when the heiress Joan I of Navarre and Champagne married the future Philip IV in 1284; it merged fully with the royal domain when their son Louis X became king in 1314.
Common questions
- What was the County of Champagne?
- Comté de Champagne; capital Troyes (from campania, "open country"). Under counts such as Hugh I, Theobald II and Henry I "the Liberal" it became one of the wealthiest and most cultured French principalities.
- When did the County of Champagne exist?
- The County of Champagne existed 10th century–1284/1314. On this map it is drawn AD 990–1027, 1040–1065, 1094–1125, 1152–1284.
- How large was the County of Champagne?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the County of Champagne covered about 27,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each territory as the primary basis, cross-checked against Encyclopædia Britannica and specialist snippets, and flags entries built on unreliable foundations — the 911 treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte known only from Dudo of Saint-Quentin, and Arnaud Amalric's alleged order at Béziers attested only decades after the fact. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — County of Champagne en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_of_Champagne
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
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