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404 Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra

authors who did not participate personally accepted as accurate, to
the 26-30,000 which are the estimates given by Lope de Soria, the
resident imperial ambassador in Venice and which can also be found
in contemporary, official accounts. As we alluded to earlier, the main
impediment to reaching an accurate conclusion relates to the paucity
and fragmentation of the surviving documentation on the organisation
and financing of the campaign.
The papers of Juan de Rena suffer from similar limitations: they
are patchy and limited, essentially concerning the construction of five
galleys in the dockyards of Barcelona that were destined for the
squadron of Álvaro de Bazán “el viejo” (senior), who was at this point
the commander of the Spanish galley fleet. Nevertheless, the three
bundles of documentation furnish us with the most detailed and
concrete evidence to date of the costs involved in fitting out the fleet.
They also contain information on the four ships added to the fleet to
transport the many horses, which were also used as transports to
bring a number of woodcutters and caulkers to Barcelona as they were
in desperately short supply and essential to speed up the
preparations. There was an acute shortage of skilled labour in the port
given the volume of work to be done. Among Rena’s documents two
exceptional maps can be found showing the battlefield near La Goleta.
However, it should be admitted at the outset that the documentation
is particularly valuable for what it reveals about the emperor’s
consolidation of power over Navarre, rather than what it reveals about
his foreign ventures. It is also very useful to trace the evolution of
galley construction in the sixteenth century, and adds considerably to
our scant knowledge of the Barcelona dockyards. But with respect to
the Tunis campaign, at most, it can illuminate a specific aspect, that
is the fitting out of a number of effectives in the Spanish galley fleet,
and it is therefore of limited value when it comes to estimating the
overall costs of the campaign . The documents concern the building
24
and fitting out of five galleys and of the horse transports. They do not
give the overall cost of these vessels, nor do they give details of the
cost of the artillery that they would need on board, because these
aspects were dealt with by other paymasters and the funds came from
different sources. Nor do they give any indication of wages or of what
the men who came on board were paid. Although the nature of this

24 «Por la de su Majestad vera v.s. y por las que escribiere el señor Príncipe y el
protonotario micer Juan Rena a lo que se offreciere en lo del armada y en todo lo demás
por lo qual en esta no tengo más que decir sino que no se perdiera tiempo en adereçar
las cosas necesarias para la breve espedizion que será presto con la ayuda de Nuestro
Señor». Ags, E, 1366, n. 144, Gómez de Figueroa to Francisco de los Cobos, Genoa, 12
February 1533.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVII - Agosto 2020
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)