Locations

The activities of the States General not only concerned the territory of the Republic, but extended far beyond it through their involvement with foreign affairs, defence and the superintendence of the trading companies. The resolutions therefore contain many mentions of geographical names. In Goetgevonden these geographical names are considered as an entity. This entity is referred to as ‘locations’.

The locations were recognised using an automatic process, in which the final assignment of a location reference in the text of a resolution to an identified location was based on a manually compiled list of locations that appear in the resolutions. This list contains all (found) locations that appear more than once in the resolutions and is therefore fairly complete: an identified location was assigned to more than 90% of the text places that were recognised as a location reference. Text places where this was not possible were omitted from this dataset.

In principle, the contemporary form was chosen for the name of locations. Forms that deviate significantly from this form have been included as a separate field in the dataset. Where present, this list should not be seen as complete: the variation in spelling of place names alone is considerable.

This dataset contains both places (cities, villages, forts) and areas (countries, seigneuries). These are not always easy to distinguish from each other. It therefore occurs that a location entry is assigned to the main location when in fact the entire area is intended; this is the case even where the area is included as an independent entity in the dataset.

Where possible, each identified location is provided with the following additional geographical data:

Geographic coordinates

A GeoNames identifier

Continent region

Modern country

Current province (only within the Netherlands)

Location references in the text of the resolutions occasionally contain additional designations such as ‘city’, ‘river’ or ‘duchy’. Designations that (sometimes) occur at a given location have been assigned to the location as categories in this dataset. This makes it possible, for example, to include all locations in one go, that are designated as or with dorp (‘village’) by the States General itself. Please note that the category dorp does not include all villages, but only those that are called villages. It also occurs that a place in a larger whole (described as ‘village X in the county Y’, ‘dorp X in het graafschap Y’) has been assigned the category of the large whole.

This concerns the following categories: Abbey, Craft, Bay, Bank, Barony, Bishopric, District, Village, Island, Fort, Area, Municipality, County, Port, Seigneury, Heath, Duchy, Cape, Canton, Chapel, Castelroy, Castle, Parish, Colony, Kingdom, Circle, Coast, Quarter, Country, Landscape, Marquisate, Palatinate, Parish, Plantation, Polder, Province, Roadstead, Republic, River, City, Street and Principality.