A Most Splendid Company: A Database of People from Sixteenth-Century New Spain

Welcome to the companion digital project to Shirley and Richard Flint's analytical history A Most Splendid Company: The Coronado Expedition in Global Perspective. On this site you will find a series of displays of the large volume of data the Flints amassed during research in dozens of archives concerning hundreds of people who participated in or were associated with the Coronado Expedition of 1539-1542 into what is now northwest Mexico and the American Southwest.

The data presented describe a substantial segment of the European population of New Spain during the middle of the sixteenth century, as well as Native American and African participants in the enterprise of the expedition. Much of the collected data is supplemental to the information provided in the book, A Most Splendid Company.

The data deal with such subjects as age and origin; family and social connections; social, economic, and political status; ambitions and motives; allegiances; employment; education; linguistic, cultural, legal, and religious complexity; mobility throughout the Spanish Empire and beyond; financing of undertakings within the Spanish Empire; relations between the Americas and the Spanish metropol, to list only a few. We invite you to explore the data and use them for your own purposes.

The data, maps, graphics, photos, and other visualizations presented here are provided for educational and research use only, and are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. For reproduction permission, please contact the University of New Mexico Libraries Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication division at disc@unm.edu.