Provins

Provins was one of the four fair towns of the counts of Champagne, and the only one whose medieval fabric survives so complete. It held two fairs a year, the May fair of Saint-Quiriace in the upper town and the autumn fair of Saint-Ayoul in the lower town. Merchants brought Flemish and Italian cloth, spices and leather, and settled their accounts in the denier provinois, which Provins had minted since the ninth century. The upper town's ramparts, 1,200 metres long with twenty-two towers, were built between 1226 and 1314, around the great keep known as the Tour César.

Champagne passed to the French crown in 1285 when Joan of Navarre married Philip IV, and by 1337 the fairs were already in decline as Italian merchants turned to sea routes and the cloth trade of Flanders moved elsewhere. Provins fell back on its own cloth industry and on the roses said to have been brought from the East by Count Thibaut IV, or by Edmund of Lancaster. On 3 August 1429, days after his coronation at Reims, Charles VII heard Mass at Saint-Quiriace with Joan of Arc. In 1432 an Anglo-Burgundian force captured the town, though it later returned to the French crown.