The Briennois ContextThe‘Colbert-Fontainebleau continuation’of William of Tyre’sHistory
notes, helpfully, that the county of Brienne is located‘between Bar-
sur-Aube and Rosnay’.^11 It is a sign of the relative insignificance of the
county itself that it needed to be explained in this way. However, this
does raise a question about its precise extent. The obvious starting point
is to identify locations at which contemporary counts of Brienne, or
members of their immediate family, exercised some kind of lordship.
Even if little more than a start is made on this task, a pattern begins to
emerge (seeMap 1). The county of Brienne evidently consisted of a
relatively homogeneous bloc of land, rather more than thirty miles by
twenty, located in the fertile, prosperous heart of Champagne, not all that
far from one of the region’s principal cities, Troyes. With its own heart-
land on the banks of the river Aube due east from the city, the county of
Brienne’s centre was, unsurprisingly, the eponymous castle town, which
now goes by the name of Brienne-le-Château.
This brings us naturally to the wealth and value of the county. It seems
quite clear that the county of Brienne grew steadily and substantially
richer during the twelfth century, as did the Champagne region as a
whole. It is plausible to speculate that this was largely a consequence of
the calendar of trade fairs sponsored and protected by the Briennes’
neighbours and suzerains, the counts of Champagne.^12 It would not be
surprising if the Briennes profited a great deal from the fairs, despite the
fact that they took place elsewhere. The castle of Brienne sat astride one
of the main trade routes in Champagne, along the old Roman road from
Châlons to Langres.^13 Nevertheless, the evidence does not permit us to
be precise about the value of the county during the period under discus-
sion. D’Arbois de Jubainville suggested that it was worth some 3,000
livres tournoisby 1270, but it seems doubtful that thisfigure can be
applied to the eleventh and twelfth centuries.^14 In 1201, Count Walter
III of Brienne mortgaged all his land for at least 700l., but, necessarily,
this can hardly give us the whole picture.^15 On both these occasions,
however, thefigures are in the high hundreds or thousands of pounds,
and this at a time when few of the‘great holdings’in Champagne were
(^11) The‘Colbert-Fontainebleau continuation’(that is, the main text) inRHC: Historiens
occidentaux, ii, 234.
(^12) For the fairs, see E. Chapin,Les villes de foires de Champagne(Paris, 1937), and R. K.
Berlow,‘The Development of Business Techniques Used at the Fairs of Champagne’,
13 Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History8 (1971), 3–32.
14 See Bur,La formation du comté de Champagne, 144; and Roserot,Dictionnaire, i, 241.
See de Sassenay,Brienne,53–4.^15 See p.41.
The Briennois Context 13