Guild Master Builders and Craft Continuity

Calle Las Armas is a good place to shift from anonymous craft traditions to named people in the documentary record. Zaragoza created a formal confraternity of Mudéjar master builders in 1503. Sources also document Muslim or converted master builders working in the city across the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, including Mahoma Ramí, Farax Galí and Alí Alcahududi. After converting in 1526, Alí Alcahududi took the name Juan de Lanuza. His career is especially useful because the record shows that a Muslim-trained master builder could reach the municipal post of maestro de ciudad in sixteenth-century Zaragoza. That is a more precise story than claiming an uninterrupted monopoly or a single guild street: named careers show how building knowledge continued through a period of major political and religious change.