Jiménez

Most European surnames descend from somebody ordinary. Jiménez is one of the very few common Spanish names that is also a dynasty of kings. From the 9th century a family out of the Pyrenean north grew until, by the 11th and 12th centuries, it held the royal houses of Navarre, Aragón, Castile, León and Galicia, and lands in southern France.

Historians call them the Jiménez dynasty; Iberian writers knew them as the Jimena, the Sancha and the Banu Abarca. They were central to the Reconquista, enlarging the ground the Christian states held directly and reducing neighbouring taifas to vassalage. Every Jiménez royal line failed in the male line in the 12th or 13th century. The surname did not die with them.

The first known member, García Jiménez of Pamplona, is a shadow. The Códice de Roda calls him "king of another part of the kingdom" of Pamplona: a lord of Navarrese country beyond the Íñiguez kings' reach, probably on the frontier of Álava and the western Pyrenees. A Gascon origin was long assumed, but that is tradition rather than settled fact.

In 905 his younger son Sancho Garcés used foreign help to displace the Íñiguez ruler Fortún Garcés and gather the monarchy into his family's hands. He is the founder in practice; Muslim writers of the peninsula called them Banu Sanjo, the descendants of Sancho, for generations after. Sancho I beat off attacks from the Emir of Córdoba, crushed the neighbouring Banu Qasi and pushed Pamplona into the upper Ebro valley, drawing the previously autonomous County of Aragón into the realm.

He died in 925, leaving a child heir, García Sánchez I, under his mother Toda Aznárez of Pamplona, who built a web of alliances across Christian Iberia. In 934 she pledged allegiance by treaty to her nephew the caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III, who confirmed her son's rule, an act some historians read instead as prising García free of his mother. Three generations of defeat and subjection to the Caliphate followed.

Navarre broke free of Cordoban overlordship only under Sancho the Great, who ruled Pamplona from 1000 to 1035 and, by right of conquest, Aragón, Castile, Ribagorza and eventually León, though never Galicia. The Count of Barcelona did him homage. Crowned in León, he took an imperial title over all Spain.

Then he divided it. His domains were split among his sons at his death, and three kingdoms emerged, each with a Jiménez king: Navarre to the eldest, García; Aragón independent under his illegitimate brother Ramiro I; Castile under Ferdinand I, who in 1037 killed his nominal overlord the King of León and Galicia in battle and took both realms. Ferdinand's son Alfonso VI reunited that inheritance, conquered Toledo and reclaimed the imperial title.

Navarre's branch fell first. In 1076 Sancho IV was assassinated by his own siblings, and his cousins Alfonso VI of Castile and Sancho Ramírez of Aragón carved the kingdom up between them, the Aragonese king taking the Navarrese crown.

The holdings came together once more when Alfonso the Battler, king of Navarre and Aragón, married Urraca, Queen of Castile and León, and claimed the imperial title with her. The marriage failed. Castile and León passed to Urraca's son by an earlier marriage; on Alfonso's death Aragón went to his brother and Navarre to a descendant of its original ruling family. Both crowns then passed on through heiresses: Petronilla of Aragón, whose marriage to the ruler of Barcelona created the Crown of Aragón, and Blanca, sister of Sancho VII, whose death in 1234 ended Jiménez rule.

The prestige outlived the power. In the 15th century the Borgias of Italy produced a pedigree tracing themselves to Pedro de Atarés, lord of Borja in Zaragoza, a real scion of the family who had competed for the thrones of Navarre and Aragón after the Battler's death. It would have made the Borgias male-line Jiménez. It was a fabrication.

The name is older than the kings who wore it. Jimeno, in the older spelling Ximeno, is a pre-Roman given name first found in the Basque lands, and its root appears to be the Basque semen, son, attested in Aquitanian inscriptions in forms such as Sembeconnis. The patronymic appears in the 10th-century genealogies of the Códice de Roda as Scemenonis, the same manuscript that preserves the dynasty's first shadowy lord.

That half of the story matters more to most readers than the crowns do. Every man named Jimeno made his sons Jiménez, so the name went on being made in ordinary households long after the royal lines had failed, and most Jiménez families descend from northern Iberian farmers, soldiers and townsmen rather than kings. What they share with the dynasty is the name-stock itself.

The best-known medieval bearer after the kings is Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, 13th-century archbishop of Toledo and the great chronicler of the Reconquista, the man who wrote down much of the story his own surname belonged to.

A family that writes the name Ximénez or Giménez is not spelling it wrongly; it is carrying an older or regional layer of it. Spain revised the orthography (the -es ending to -ez, and the shift from X to J) only in the late 18th century, so forms that froze before then, or outside Castile's reach, kept the older shape. Portugal never made the change, which is why Ximenes is the usual form there and in former Portuguese territories.

Aragón, Asturias and Galicia often kept -es; Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearics used -is instead, giving Ximenis and Eiximenis; Sicily has Scimemi, Naples Chimenez. In Spanish the forms ending in -z take an acute accent on the second syllable, and English-language records drop it, which is how the name reaches an American census sheet as Jimenez. Whichever spelling a household carries, the word underneath it is the same: son of Jimeno.