Where does this come from, and can I check it?

Annual trade gatherings in France let merchants settle debts without hauling coins. The figure is taken from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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Yes. It sits on the History shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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The Champagne fairs helped invent paper credit

Annual trade gatherings in France let merchants settle debts without hauling coins In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the counts of Champagne sponsored a rotating cycle of fairs at Troyes, Provins, Lagny and Bar-sur-Aube, drawing cloth merchants from Flanders and Italian bankers. Because the fairs followed one another through the year, merchants began settling accounts with written promises rather than coin. That practice fed the growth of banking in Italy. It sits in Mondo's history collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Tags: champagne, fairs, banking

The Champagne fairs helped invent paper credit: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Annual trade gatherings in France let merchants settle debts without hauling coins. The figure is taken from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a history fact?: Yes. It sits on the History shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.