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Downloading the Livro do Armeiro-Mor

The Livro do Armeiro-Mor (Book of Great Armigers) was painted in Portugal 1506-09 by Jean Du Cros.

As with a number of other period armorials, it has been photographically digitized at high resolution, but the only publicly-available source for these scans is a “click to pan and zoom” web interface operated by the Portuguese Archives Network, which is hard to flip through rapidly, and can’t be accessed when offline at an event.

Gunnvôr silfrahárr has a PDF version posted which has a very helpful name index, but the images have been compressed, so the quality is significantly lower than the original scans. Some of the pages are available at the Wikimedia Commons, but the resolution isn’t as high, and the collection is incomplete.

So, I downloaded each of the full scanned images and combined them into PDF file. There wasn’t any technical wizardry involved — just clicking the download link 277 times.

As with the previous rounds, I’m posting a compressed PDF here (13 MB) and will share the full size PDF or JPEGs (210 MB) by request.

[Update, November 2022:] I’ve uploaded this book to archive.org where it can be browsed or downloaded as a PDF or a ZIP of image files

4 thoughts on “Downloading the Livro do Armeiro-Mor”

  1. Hi Mathghamhain,

    I am doing some research on my family which of Portuguese descend and I too am interested in a full size PDF of the Livro do Armeiro-Mor if you can share it with me. As well, I was wondering if you have by chance full size PDFs of these two other books:

    1. Livro da Nobreza e Perfeiçam das Armas
    2. Thesouro de Nobreza

    I think these three books are the oldest ones that document Portuguese arms, however if you know of any others I would appreciate you letting me know about them as well.

    Thanks very much in advance for any help you can provide,

    Steven

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