Carvalho

Carvalho is the oak. The Latin for the tree is quercus, so the Portuguese word is not borrowed from Rome but native, traced to a root given as Carwos in Galaico, the Hispano-Celtic speech of the north west. Before it was a family name it was a map reference: Carvalho in Penacova, Carvalho in the district of Coimbra, Carvalho at Ceira. The same name stands across the frontier in Galicia as Carballo, thick around Vigo, and the likeliest account has the Carvalhos coming south into Portugal out of Galicia.

The oldest hard trace of the family is a signature. In 1131 a donation to the monastery of Lorvão was signed by Pelagius Carvalis, Payo Carvalho, lord of all the land on which the Morgado de Carvalho would later stand. Records of the name run from the twelfth century, appearing in older documents as Carvalio.

A second strand puts the family at the Quinta de Carvalho, in the freguesia of São Miguel de Carvalho in what is now the district of Braga, with Mem Paz de Carvalho as its patriarch. Mem Paz was son of Paio de Carvalho, recorded in 1136 as a fidalgo of King Afonso Henriques (ca. 1106-1185), himself son of Moninho Muniz, patron of the monastery of Arnoia. The noble Carvalhos are in the record in the first decades of the kingdom, attached to the king who made it.

The name itself explains why the house is hard to follow. A noble son took his father's given name with a suffix, so Mem, son of Paio, becomes Mem Paz, or Pais, or Paes, and only then was the toponymic added, here the Honra de Carvalho. As a rule only the firstborn inherited the surname, so brothers raised in one house could end under three names.

On 14 August 1385 the Castilian claim to the Portuguese crown was settled by battle near the town of Aljubarrota. Most Portuguese would not have a Spanish king, members of the Carvalho family among them, and they took as their leader João, Master of Avis. The victory kept the kingdom independent and confirmed the weight of the burgher class that had made the revolution of 1383.

What the family took from that day was land. Bartolomeu Domingues, reckoned one of the noblest men in Portugal, received from João of Avis, for services during the battle, the lands of Carvalho in the concelho of Penacova, at the foot of the Serra do Carvalho. The Morgado de Carvalho was the first entail of its kind in the country and stayed the family's solar, and his son Soeiro Lopes Domingues took the name Soeiro Gomes de Carvalho in 1386, the first bearer whose use of the surname is demonstrable rather than assumed.

Later the crown put the family's standing on a ceiling. Manuel I (1469-1521), fourteenth king of Portugal, had the nobility reorganised and qualified on the criteria of honour, history and property, and the seventy-two houses judged most illustrious had their arms painted in the Sala dos Brasões of the royal palace at Sintra. The Carvalho arms are among them.

Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo was born at Sernancelhe in Viseu on 13 May 1699, eldest of the twelve children of Manuel de Carvalho e Ataíde, a fidalgo with properties in the Leiria region. The family's standing was minor but respectable, and his uncle Paulo de Carvalho e Ataíde was a professor at the University of Coimbra and later archpriest under the Patriarch of Lisbon. Sebastião José read law at Coimbra, served briefly in the army, and in 1723 eloped with Teresa de Noronha e Bourbon Mendonça e Almada (1689-1737), widowed niece of the Count of Arcos; the couple withdrew to the family estate at Pombal.

His uncle got him his first public post in 1738, as ambassador to Great Britain. He used London to investigate the causes, techniques and mechanisms of British commercial and naval power, collecting Thomas Mun, William Petty and Josiah Child, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1740. Ambassador to Austria from 1745, he was recalled in 1749. Joseph I came to the throne in 1750 and made him Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; by 1755 he was chief minister.

On the morning of 1 November 1755 Lisbon was woken by a violent earthquake, since estimated at a magnitude of 9, and the city was razed by the shock and the tsunami and fires that followed. Carvalho e Melo survived by luck and, unshaken, took the rebuilding on himself at once. What he is remembered as saying is the shortest programme any minister ever set out: what now? We bury the dead and heal the living. He issued a rapid series of Providences to stabilise the city, and Lisbon suffered no epidemics and was partly rebuilt inside a year.

The new centre was designed by a group of architects with a specific brief: it had to survive the next one. They used caging, a wooden framework raised early in construction, whose flexibility gave a building a better chance of riding out a shock, and models were tested by marching troops around them to simulate the tremor. The buildings and squares of the Pombaline downtown are the first earthquake-resistant buildings in the world. The man the Portuguese record names as the architect of Pombaline Lisbon carried the surname too: Eugénio dos Santos Carvalho, born at Aljubarrota.

He also sent a survey to every parish in the country, the Parochial Memories of 1758, asking whether animals had behaved strangely beforehand, whether the water in the wells had risen or fallen, and how many buildings had come down. The answers went unanalysed at the time, partly because the man in charge of them died, but they have since let Portuguese scientists reconstruct the event with real precision. Because he was the first to attempt an objective description of an earthquake's causes and consequences, he is counted a forerunner of modern seismology.

What he had studied in London he applied at home. Royal monopolies, chartered trading companies and guilds were built over each branch of commerce, and the Douro Wine Company demarcated the Douro region for the production of port to guarantee the wine's quality: the second attempt in Europe to control wine quality by region, after Tokaj in Hungary. He reorganised the army and navy and ended the Limpeza de Sangue statutes, which had discriminated against New Christians and their descendants at any genealogical distance. In education he laid the basis for secular public schools, brought in vocational training and added departments of mathematics and natural sciences to Coimbra.

The reforms were tested by war. In 1761 Spain allied with France and demanded that Portugal cut off all trade with Britain or face invasion, and Carvalho e Melo joined the king in rejecting the ultimatum. Spanish troops crossed on 5 May 1762 into Trás-os-Montes to take Porto and were driven back by guerrillas. He had written urgently to London, and 7,104 British troops arrived with the Count of Schaumburg-Lippe. Victories at Valencia de Alcântara and Vila Velha, with scorched earth against the Bourbon supply lines, starved the invasion into collapse. Joseph I made him Count of Oeiras in 1759 and Marquis of Pombal in 1769.

Pombal left office in 1777 on the death of Joseph I and died on his estate at Pombal in 1782. Lisbon settled its account with him in the end: one of the city's busiest squares and its busiest underground station carry his name. The older Portuguese genealogists reckon his the most illustrious family of the name in the male line, while adding carefully that his house may not have held the headship of the ancient Carvalho family; that sat with the morgado at Penacova.

They can hedge like that because Carvalho is frequent in Portugal and Spain, and there are several families of the name not necessarily related to one another. Two men living by two different oak woods, one in the Braga country and one under the Serra do Carvalho, both became Carvalho without sharing a grandfather, and the Galician Carballos multiply the effect again. The sampled male lines agree: R1b is much the commonest, but J2, E1b1b, G, I2 and J1 all appear, and the surname is found among Portuguese Jews as well. The thing to trace is a place rather than a patriarch.