The first iteration of ETAF will draw its content from the eighty-one Registres aux Ordres of the Secrétairie d'État et de Guerre (AGR/ARA, Brussels). These volumes document changes in the wages, rank, and unit of thousands of soldiers and often provide physical descriptions, parentage, age, and information on the formation, disbandment, and mergers of the Army's units. The database infrastructure is almost complete and is currently being tested.
Reintegrating the legacy of the Army of Flanders into modern European academic and public discourse will reconnect information stored in separate thematic and national silos, promoting transnational scholarly collaboration across historical disciplines, overcoming divisive narratives, and informing current debates about European military cooperation.
TOOLS:
Project ETAF addresses historiographical and source fragmentation by creating an online, open-access, factoid-based prosopographical database tracking military personnel and units across careers, origins, and networks.
ETAF will enable analysis at multiple levels: individual career trajectories and social mobility; geographic recruitment patterns across Europe; patronage networks spanning national boundaries; unit-level dynamics as social spaces; unit genealogies and institutional evolution across generations.
OBJECTIVES:
Further iterations of the database will build on these foundations by combining prosopographical data from administrative records with information from narrative sources (histories, treatises, newsletters etc.) featuring the Army and its soldiers or written by them. Existing prosopographical resources should be integrated, as should an automated information extraction pipeline based on Handwritten Text Recognition and text mining methods.
