To Live Like a Moor. Olivia Remie Constable
predecessor, himself a member of the very first generation of Moriscos: Francisco Núñez Muley, born into an elite Muslim family in Granada shortly before the city’s surrender to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. Many years later, in 1567, the now venerable Morisco took up his pen to protest prohibitions recently promulgated by royal officials on certain activities by Moriscos—frequenting baths, speaking Arabic or possessing Arabic books, using their old family names, singing their traditional songs, or wearing their traditional dress. According to the officials, these activities were Islamic or Islamizing. They threatened or belied the Moriscos’ Christian faith and therefore had to be abandoned by them, whether of their own volition or by force. In page after page of his memorandum, Núñez Muley argued that these aspects of Morisco culture were local customs, not carriers or determinants of what we today would call religious identity. Ancient communities of Christians in the Holy Land, he pointed out, spoke Arabic and dressed in local garb but were no less Christian for that. Foods and foodways were not matters of faith but of habit and taste; baths were a question of hygiene, not of Islam, for Moriscos who labored in fields and mines.
Núñez Muley’s passionate and precocious critique of these totalizing Christian models of Muslim “identity” appeals to the present antiessentialist generation of historians, who have learned to think of culture as construction, but it went unheeded in its own day. The prohibitions on dress, food, language, and so on were imposed on the Moriscos, with tragic results: violence, rebellion, massacre, and eventually expulsion. This book is a history of those cultural practices, a history that Núñez Muley did not—could not—write. Would the outcome have been different if Christian authorities had been able to read Remie Constable’s history rather than Núñez Muley’s polemic? The question may seem perverse, but I ask it to make a point: To Live Like a Moor is a book that teaches us about a history with enormous consequences for Muslims and Christians alike. How we learn to think about that history today may not change the fate of the Moriscos, as Núñez Muley tried to do, but it may very well help us change our own “fate,” as we think about similar questions about religion, Islam, and Christianity in our day.
To Live Like a Moor is the last book we can hope for from Remie Constable’s pen. Indeed she was not able to complete the manuscript before her untimely (she was fifty-three) death in 2014. She bequeathed the task of preparation for publication to her student Robin Vose, to whom we as readers owe an enormous debt. (Professor Vose describes the precise contours of his editing in the following preface.) It seems fitting here, in the first pages of her final work, to dwell for a moment on its elder siblings, for her career was fruitful and extremely distinguished, although too brief.
The honor of primogeniture belongs to her Princeton doctoral dissertation, published as Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge, 1994). The title alone makes clear the subject and vast scope of that book, although no title could reveal the riches it contained. For already in this first book Professor Constable displayed the characteristic virtues that mark all her subsequent work: a special focus on the material conditions of life, a willingness to embrace time spans of a length that make most historians blanch, and a technical ability to work with a vast array of sources, from Arabic chronicles to the ledgers of Genoese merchants, from pilgrimage narratives to ships’ manifests.
Trade and Traders was a book very much alert to the lessons of the founding giants—Fernand Braudel, Charles Verlinden, Roberto S. Lopez, and Shelomo Dov Goitein—who taught the historical profession about the enduring importance of the movement of commerce as a mode of what we might call cultural production and intercultural exchange. It was equally influenced by the next generation in this field, some of them Constable’s teachers at Princeton, such as Abraham Udovitch and Mark Cohen. But unlike the work of these great predecessors, it was marked by equally deep commitments to the western European and the Islamic medieval traditions, and to sources both Latin and Arabic. In this sense the book marked the emergence of a new generation of historians of the Mediterranean, one eager to explore the interaction between Christendom and Islamdom along as many axes as possible.
Remie Constable was not only a founder of this generation, she was also particularly gifted at discovering new axes for it to explore. I think it is on page 43 of Trade and Traders that readers first encounter what seems merely a detail of some of the treaties negotiated between the Almohads and the Genoese: these often included provisions regarding the establishment of funduqs (translated here as “hostelries”) for Genoese merchants in Almohad lands. It is difficult to imagine trade agreements today spending much time on hotels for business travelers, but by page 119 we learn that one anonymous author reported as many as sixteen hundred such establishments in early thirteenth-century Islamic Córdoba, while others reported roughly one thousand in Almería: places “where merchants, travelers, single men, foreigners, and others may stay.”
I am not sure if Professor Constable already knew as she wrote those pages that in these funduqs she had found the foundations for her next book, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2003). Again her penchant for titles both clear and illuminating makes evident the vast scope of the book, which used the long history of “hotels”—from the ancient Greek pandocheia so scathingly criticized by Plato in his Laws, to the funduqs of classical Islam and their final transformation into fondacos at the hands of European commercial powers like the Catalans and the Venetians—to explore a long and shifting history of exchange and interaction between communities of disparate faiths.
Like Trade and Traders, the book was a major contribution to the long tradition of scholarship on commercial institutions from which she in some sense descended. But it is also a monument of scholarship in the tradition of another of her teachers, John Boswell, who captured her attention (as he did that of so many others, including me) during her undergraduate years at Yale. Much as Boswell had done in works like The Kindness of Strangers (1988), on the abandonment of children in western Europe, but on an even wider canvas that included the Islamic as well as the Christian world, Constable proceeded to create a pointillist portrait of a vast but hitherto overlooked cultural formation out of an accumulation of tiny shards of detail expertly recovered from a seemingly endless library of heterogeneous sources. Is it fanciful to detect a hint of homage in the echo between titles?
If for the sake of brevity I mention only her monumental monographs, it is not for lack of contributions in other genres. Remie was also mistress of the short form, and published pieces—such as her article on the medieval slave trade as an aspect of Muslim-Christian relations, or her essay on chess and courtly culture—chiseled and compressed on fundamental topics that others might have stretched into a book. She also translated her pedagogical gifts into print, editing a collection of documents for the classroom that has become the broad gate through which a generation of students enters into the rich “multicultural” history of medieval Iberia.2
The present book, unlike Professor Constable’s previous works, is not primarily about commercial institutions or relations. Its arch extends over fewer centuries, and its emphasis is more melancholic: more a history of how exchange was impeded than how it was facilitated. But like all of her engagements with the past, this one is focused on the ever-shifting cultural formations that mediated interactions between Muslims and Christians (and Jews as well, though these were less often the focus of her attention) in the medieval Mediterranean and especially Spain. It is easy enough to see how it grew out of her previous engagements. Trade and Traders already pivoted around the great shift that occurred in the relative fortunes of Iberian Islam and Christianity, and Housing the Stranger contained revealing pages about how that same shift transformed the meaning and function of the funduq of Valencia.
But it is also easy enough to see how these differences illustrate yet another of Professor Constable’s great virtues as a historian: because she was always on the qui vive for new approaches and interests emerging in the profession, her work could put the medieval material she mined so well to the service of historians discovering those emerging topics even before they knew they wanted it. To pick but one example, whatever period they work in, the many historians who are becoming interested in the cultural work done by material culture—dress, food, housewares and furnishing,