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I have a response to Olivia Orozco's interest in the connection(s) between Azpilcueta and
Al-Maqrizi.
 
l. Mark Tomass offered a stimulating account of Al-Maqrizi's MS in 
 
Tomass, Mark. 1996. Al-Maqrizi's Book of Aiding the Nation By Investigating the Depression
of 1403-06" in L. S. Moss, ed. Joseph A. Schumpeter: Historian of Economics. London:
Routledge, pp. 110-152.
 
This MS was written Arabic by an Egyptian. Tomass reports that there are 6 versions of the
MS but his list of locations does not include Spain (or what is now Portugal).
 
2. On p. 144, Tomass describes the MS as having some common ground with his "teacher" Ibn
Khaldun and that Al-Maqrizi had a successor Al-Asadi. I did not know that Khaldun was Al-
Maqrizi's "teacher" until Tomass made the claim. In the same edited book containing
Tomass's monograph there is an essay by Louis Baeck that links Ibn Khaldun to Al-Maqrizi
and the Andalusian epigone Ibn Azraq. Could Ibn Azraq be the intermediary?
 
3. How the MS might have reached Spain in time for Martin de Azpicueta Navarro's 1556
classic Comentario resolutorio de usuras is a question only worth answering if there were
some doctrinal/structural connection(s) between the writings.  Both writings are concerned
with the state of the coinage and debasement with the later MS offering a pre-Bodin
statement of the quantity theory of the purchasing power of money. The Al-Maqrizi MS
offers a discussion of an economic crisis and the causes with interesting references to
Islamic moral philosophy. The Azpicueta MS is connected more closely with the pastoral
duties of the Christian clergy [guilty merchants confessing?] in a climate of expanding
commerce as Christian Spain ventured out to the new world and brought the gold back from
America.
 
At the risk of serious anachronism perhaps one might say that the Azpicueta writings were
the product of an "boom" and Al-Maqrizi's a cruel "bust."
(see Grice-Hutchinson, Marjorie, 1993. L. Moss and C. Ryan, eds. Economic Thought in
Spain: Selected Essays. Aldershot, Elgar.)
 
4. I also suggest that Olivia Orozco make some effort to link her main writers to Louis
Baeck's interesting suggestion that the center of gravity of economic thought SHIFTED from
the Mediterranean tradition to the Atlantic tradition and with it many of the leading
issues and concerns. See his The Mediterranean Tradition in Economic Thought (London:
Routledge, 1994).
 
I hope these references are useful and Olivia Orozco continues her research since I,
myself, have found these connections puzzling and worth pursuing.
 
Laurence S. Moss 
 
 
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