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The black or rarely roan Murgese is a mesomorph horse, mainly reared in Apulia, recently selected for the saddle. The<br />first official registry of Murgese was established in 1926. All the existing Murgese horses can be traced back to a small<br />number of founders (46 founder mares and 9 stallions). This work aims to monitor the genetic structure of the actual<br />population by analysing the available genealogical information from 2708 animals and a data-set containing 563 typing<br />records of twelve microsatellites. Inbreeding coefficients were estimated for the whole sample and for the animals born<br />from 1992 to 1999. A total of 23 generations were found. The average inbreeding coefficient was 0.0165 for the last three<br />generations, whereas inbreeding was below 2% in animals born in the 92-99 period. The contribution of founders was<br />unbalanced. The overall FIS coefficient estimation was 0.025 and suggests that mating is generally at random in the population.<br />However, some statistics obtained from this study, i.e. the inbreeding coefficient higher than 0.015 in the 70 animals<br />of the 19th, 20th, and 21st generations, should induce breeders to more attention in planning mating.