ABSTRACT
Obligations were not a sixteenth-century innovation; they had been circulating at the thirteenth-century Champagne and Flanders fairs and had been registered by the city authorities of Ypres .3 e IOUs used in sixteenth-century Antwerp originated in the fair cycle that had laid the foundations for Antwerp’s spectacular economic growth: these traditional IOUs were written by buyers and sellers for payment at the next fair in Antwerp or Bergen-op-Zoom (roughly every three months).4 Increasingly, these debt contracts were passed on by the creditor to others. e commercial growth was stimulated by this transferability of IOUs yet also endangered by it: the growing scale of the market, the perma-
nent character it had assumed and the rising merchant population created a growing and potentially undermining anonymity. Did a new creditor still know the original debtor mentioned in the contract? Or did evolving laws and commercial custom render this familiarity obsolete?
