During the later thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries commercial clothmaking in north-western Europe became more widespread than it had been before. The overland routes which had linked the Flemish cloth towns by way of Champagne to markets in France, central Europe and the Mediterranean gave way to a variety of new ones pioneered first by Italian and German, later by English and Dutch merchants. Opportunities for making cloth broadened as the pattern of trade became more extended. Meanwhile the larger cloth towns, Ypres, Ghent and Bruges, paid a heavy penalty for their greatness. Divided by social conflict, and challenged from without by the expansive ambitions and fiscal rapaciousness of Philip IV of France, they suffered a period of crisis between 1285 and 1314 from which their fortunes never recovered. Their difficulties confirmed the advantages of mercantile activity in smaller towns. The most remarkable achievements were in the Leie valley in southern Flanders; cloths of Kortrijk and Wervik were already well known to French drapers in the late thirteenth century, and their fame spread more widely during the fourteenth. Brabant also gained from these circumstances; cloths of Louvain, Malines and Brussels sold in Paris from the 1290s. After 1320 cloths of the Leie valley and Brabant transformed the textile trade of the Mediterranean world, and as they did so new centres of production like Comines and Menen began to supply the new arteries of trade.