I’ve been going through a book here at work which has the rolls of soldiers who were members of small Spanish army unit in Natchez at the tail end of the 18th century.
Each soldier’s entry has a rank, name, and then three categories: plazas - carbinas - fusiles
Each soldier has a “1” in the plazas column.
Some have a “1” in the carbinas column and I know that means that the soldier had a carbine.
Some also have a “1” in the fusile column which means that the soldier had a rifle.
I haven’t been able to determine what “plaza” meant in this context. I’ve checked a lot of Spanish dictionaries and none seem to indicate that a “plaza” ever referred to anything that you could hold in your hand or carry with you.
Been doing some checking myself, it seems that the umpteenth meaning of “plaza” in a military context, figurative, is a “billet.” IIRC that can mean either your job posting or your quartering space. So, if all the members of the unit had 1 “plaza” it could mean
(a) that each man was holding exactly one job in the unit – no supernumeraries nor people with two different jobs
(b) that each man had 1 good bedroll/blanket/tent half
either way quite an administrative achievement for the time and place.
I had seen the entry about “to enlist”, but the way this roster was set up, it seems to me that “plazas” refers to something that the soldier owned.
So, I think that JRDelirious was on the right track. I don’t think it was that big of an administrative achievement for the time. The unit I was looking at only had 79 soldiers in it.
Every single one of them had a “plaza”, but not all of them had a “carbina” and/or a “fusile”.