Marxbrüder Master Dataset, 1491–1716

Tabular dataset of 363 identified masters of the Marxbrüder (Brotherhood of St. Mark), compiled from the Medel fight book (signature: Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg, Cod.I.6.2o.5) and the Red Book (signature: Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt, H.18.02, 13). A transcription of the Red Book is available on kiliantheil.com linked below and on 10.5281/zenodo.20816085. Contains name, hometown, occupation, rank, year, decade, and geographic coordinates where determinable. First published as part of:https://web.archive.org/web/20260524164349/https://kiliantheil.com/marxbruder/2026/02/11/mapping-the-marxbruder/ Supplementary material to: Theil, Kilian. Masters of the Longsword (forthcoming). Further details on methodology (cf. above publication): The Excel file has three content sheets: “Data” with the Marxbrüder corpus “Analysis of Occupations,” with a pivot table and plot as discussed in the source publication. “Analysis of Origins,” again with a pivot table and plot. The key sheet “Data” has 23 columns, each descriptively named. All columns in light green contain data directly extracted from the underlying sources and all columns in light blue contain derived data. The 109 masters from Cod.I.6.2º.5 were cross-validated with Jens P. Kleinau’s table, and the 33 masters originating from Nuremberg with Werner Ueberschär’s table. "Index" is a running identifier for internal reference only; it carries no meaning in the sources. "Full Name Source" contains all spelling variants found in the source. These are resolved into canonical forms in "First Name Standardized" and "Last Name Standardized." The same logic applies to "Hometown Source" and "Hometown Standardized"; as the latter requires interpretation, I add a ternary certainty label ("High," "Medium," "Low"). "Region Source" and "Citizenship Source" record the region and civic affiliation where the source gives them. There also is contextualizing metadata I added to allow for the analyses presented in the source publication. “Citizenship Source” and “Hometown Standardized” are aggregated into “Origin Aggregated” (use Hometown if available, else Citizenship) and then contextualized with geographic “Origin Latitude” and “Origin Longitude” of that place. I classify "Occupation Source" (the occupation as listed in the Marxbrüder chronicles) into seven categories of my own devising in "Occupation Classified": Furriery, Baking, Food (Non-Baking), Clothing (Non-Furriery), Metalworking, Building & Construction, and Other. Where the source records no occupation, the value is "Unknown" (75 of 363 entries); "Other" denotes an occupation that is known but fits none of the six substantive categories. "Rank" encodes whether a Marxbruder became a master (the default case), was elected captain, or made masters in the captain's stead (which I call "Proxy"). Where a man held more than one role across his mentions, the values are semicolon-separated in the order they occur (e.g., "Master;Captain;Proxy"). Three entries carry such combinations. “Years” contains the semicolon-separated years in which a Marxbruder is mentioned. I also derive “Year First” (the year of the first mention), “Decade” (the decade that “Year First” belongs to) by assigning all years 149X to decade 1490 and so forth; and “Semicentury” by assigning “Year First” into one of two halves of a century (e.g., 1400–1449 or 1450–1499). “Source” and “Source Folio” reference the mentions of that master either in the Medel Fechtbuch, or the Red Book. Because the Red Book contains a duplicated folio 35 between fols. 7 and 8, I label this redundant folio as 35* in the dataset to distinguish it from the actual final folio 35. Version history 5 September 2026: corrected occupational classification of three entries (two Bader, one Bender).