Gunners and artillery of the Spanish monarchy (1560-1610) dataset

Abstract

This dataset has been built by Brice Cossart during his PhD at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) between 2012 and 2016, for a dissertation entitled "Les artilleurs et la Monarchie Catholique: fondements technologiques et scientifiques d'un empire transocéanique". It gathers information about the artillery and artillery staff (gunners) at the service of the Spanish Monarchy in a period corresponding roughly to the second half of sixteenth century and the first decade of seventeenth century. Most of this information comes from primary sources of the Archivo General de Simancas (AGS), the Archivo General de Indias (AGI), both in Spain, the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT) in Portugal and the Archives Générales du Royaume (AGR) in Belgium. The dataset is composed of 4 tables: the first one contains prosopographical information on individual gunners (2 972 entries); the second one provides data on artillery and crew of various types of ships (621 entries); the third one presents data on artillery and personnel of different fortresses of the Spanish Monarchy (395 entries); the last one deals with technical characteristics and nomenclature of artillery (1 167 entries). These tables have been designed in Microsoft Access, in the first place as a personal tool of research, and were turned into an Excel file for diffusion purposes. Information is written in two languages: French, mother tongue of the author and language of his publication, and Spanish, the original language of most of the primary sources.