Fernand Braudel also saw the decline as due to the increasing sophistication of communications and distance credit, changing the medieval merchant from a person engaged in constant arduous travel to one who mostly controlled his affairs by correspondence. As the Champagne fairs dwindled to insignificance, their place was assumed by the fairs of Bruges, to which the Genoese ships sailed, and Cologne, a Hansa town, of Frankfurt-am-Main, of Geneva and, more locally, of Lyon.