Almeida

Almeida is a place before it is a family: a fortified village in the Riba-Côa valley in Beira, a few miles west of the Spanish border. Its first works were raised by the Muslims who held it until the Christian reconquest, and the name they gave it is the one it still carries: al-Ma'ida, Arabic for 'the table', for the flat ground it stands on. Tradition ties it to a jewelled table taken by Tariq ibn Ziyad and said to have been King Solomon's own. The surname is thoroughly Portuguese and built on an Arabic word: a small monument to al-Andalus inside a Christian kingdom's border town.

Sancho I, Portugal's second king, took the village from the Moors in the 12th century and fortified it heavily, because whoever held Almeida held the road. Dinis, Manuel I and João VI each rebuilt it, and the twelve-pointed star fortress finished in 1641 follows a Vaubanesque plan. In the siege of 1810 a chance shell found the powder magazine and killed five hundred defenders. The surname is locative, of the great Portuguese class that stands with Braga, Coimbra and Guimarães, names that say where a family came from rather than who fathered it.

The line that made the name famous was at court by the 15th century. Lopo de Almeida (1416-1486) served Afonso V and João II as knight, diplomat and finance minister, and in 1451 escorted the Infanta Leonor to Rome for her marriage to the Emperor Frederick III. On 13 June 1476 Afonso V made him first Count of Abrantes; he was the king's fourth cousin, descended from the Infante João, Duke of Valencia de Campos, son of Peter I and Inês de Castro. Of his twelve children, João became second count, Diogo Fernandes was Prior of Crato from 1492, and Jorge and Fernando were bishops of Coimbra and Ceuta.

Closeness to the crown was not safety. In the succession crisis of the 1490s the Almeidas backed João II's illegitimate son Jorge de Lencastre against Manuel, Duke of Beja. Manuel took the throne, and the family spent his whole reign as his principal political opponents, which is the background to what he did with the youngest brother in 1505.

Francisco de Almeida was born at Lisbon about 1450 and soldiered early: the Battle of Toro in 1476, campaigns in Morocco, and in 1492 the conquest of Granada alongside the Castilians. In 1505, in his mid-fifties, Manuel I appointed him first governor and viceroy of the Estado da Índia, on condition that he raise four forts on the south-western Indian coast. The commission went to a man from the house that had opposed him, which says how few Portuguese noblemen could be trusted with an armada that far from home. He sailed on 25 March 1505 with twenty-two ships and fifteen hundred soldiers.

This empire was taken by force and the page should say so. In July 1505 his ships attacked Kilwa; Mombasa, a town of some ten thousand, was stormed, plundered and burned; Barawa was destroyed and Zanzibar claimed. At Quilon he sent his son Lourenço with six ships to destroy twenty-seven Calicut vessels in the harbour. The Kolattiri of Cannanore, who had let the Portuguese build on his coast, turned on them once the safe conduct promised to Muslim merchants was violated.

Lourenço de Almeida, Francisco's only son, made the first Portuguese voyage to Ceylon in 1505, and in 1506 broke the Zamorin of Calicut's fleet at Cannanore. In March 1508 a Mamluk Egyptian fleet under Amir Husain al-Kurdi caught his squadron at Chaul and beat it, and Lourenço was killed. When Afonso de Albuquerque arrived at the end of 1508 with a secret royal commission to replace him, Almeida refused to acknowledge it and had him arrested; he would not go home with his son unavenged.

On 3 February 1509, with twenty-three ships off Diu, he destroyed a combined fleet of Mamluk Egypt, the Ottomans, the Zamorin and the Sultan of Gujarat, backed technically by Venice and Ragusa, who feared for their own eastern trade. The Ottomans and Egyptians left the Indian Ocean, and the Portuguese monopoly there held for more than a century.

He sailed for home that December and anchored in Table Bay in late February 1510 for water. His men raided the cattle of the local Khoe-speaking villagers, and on 1 March 1510 the first viceroy of India was killed on the beach with sixty-four of his own.

The house of Abrantes ended in the act that restored Portugal itself. Miguel de Almeida, fourth count (1575-1650), was one of the heroes of the uprising of 1 December 1640 that ended Spanish rule and put the Braganzas on the throne. He died without issue in 1650 and the title created for Lopo in 1476 went extinct with him.

The name outlasted the title. Luís de Almeida founded the first European hospital in Japan; Manuel de Almeida went as a Jesuit to Ethiopia. The most widely read was João Ferreira de Almeida (1628-1691), born at Várzea de Tavares, Protestant at fourteen and translating the Bible into Portuguese at sixteen. His New Testament was printed in 1681, and the Almeida Bible is still the standard Portuguese Protestant text.

Portuguese law allows up to two personal names and four surnames, the mother's family names usually before the father's, and a surname may be reclaimed from a grandparent if the family can show it was used. That is why Almeida so often turns up in the middle of a long name, and why it can skip a generation and come back.

The name travelled with the empire its viceroy helped build, and is now common in Portugal, Brazil and Cape Verde. A reader who finds Almeida in the family papers holds a chain running from an Arabic word for a table, through a border fortress blown up and rebuilt, through a count's house at the Portuguese court, and out into the Indian Ocean.