The chancery of the counts of Champagne produced eight cartularies in the course of the thirteenth century.¹ Seven survive and the eighth is fully recoverable through modern copies, making them the largest collection of princely cartularies from medieval France. In the strictest sense, the cartularies are codex copies of incoming documents stored in the chancery’s archive. When the first volume was produced in 1211, the archive held perhaps two hundred sealed letters (letters patent) from the barons and prelates of Champagne dealing in some respect with comital governance. By 1271, when the last two massive cartularies were compiled, there were...