CoMOR Workshop: "Money, Credit, and Exchange"

In the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period, local, regional and interregional trade were linked via trade fairs, which contributed significantly to economic growth. Therefore fairs were a pivotal element of economic development in pre-modern Europe.

The Franco-German research cooperation CoMOR (“Configurations of European Fairs. Merchants, Objects, Routes” [1350‒1600]), sponsored by both the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the German Research Foundation (DFG), is dedicated to analyse the system of pre-modern fairs in its entire European dimension. CoMOR brings together historians from Lyons, Erfurt, Leipzig, Trier, Torino and Verona, who systematically collect information on fairs, merchants, traded commodities and trading routes from various archival sources to build up a large data-base. The main objective of CoMOR is to reconstruct temporal and spatial changes in the in the pre-modern European system of fairs and to make these changes visible on a digital dynamic map.

The second CoMOR-workshop – to be held online on 4 February 2022 as a videoconfer-ence – will focus on trading techniques and loan relationships of merchants. Moreover, the emergence of the early-modern payment system in which cashless payments were made at trade fairs throughout Europe with the help of bills of exchange is also analysed in more detail.

To register for online participation please send an email to ulf_christian.ewert@uni-erfurt.de by 3 February 2022 at the latest.