Martínez

After the Visigoths settled Iberia the local population took up a patronymic habit built on a Latin genitive, -icī, "son of", pinned to the father's forename. The suffix split along the peninsula's languages: the son of Fernando became Fernández in Castilian, Ferrandis in Catalan, Fernandes in Galician and Portuguese, Fernanditz in Basque. Martinus took the same treatment, and Galician records carry the results side by side: Martínez, Martín and Martís, one root wearing three endings.

The habit ran thickest in central Castile and thinnest in Catalonia, where the bare father's name survived unsuffixed: Valencia says Ferrandis, Catalonia proper says Ferran. Not every Spanish -ez is a patronymic at all: in American Spanish z and s sound alike, so Chaves, Cortés and Valdés drifted into Chávez, Cortez and Valdez without ever meaning "son of". Martínez is the genuine article.

The medieval system was not inheritance, it was arithmetic done fresh each generation. Álvaro, son of Rodrigo, was Álvaro Rodríguez; his own son Juan was not Juan Rodríguez but Juan Álvarez, because the name restated whose son a man was and nothing more. A Martínez under that rule was simply a man whose father had been christened Martín.

What made Martínez a family name was the moment the arithmetic stopped. As the patronymic froze into an inheritance the statement of fact became a fiction, and the Martínez who came after carried the name of an ancestor nobody could still identify. Iberia's Arabic-speaking Christians ran the same sum: among the Mozarabs the name was Arabized to Mardanish, borne by Ibn Mardanish, alongside Arabized forms of Hernández and Gómez.

Four Spanish regions count Martínez as their commonest surname (Navarre, La Rioja, Cuenca and Murcia), a band from the Pyrenean foothills to the southeastern coast. Its relatives stand beside it in the same books: Martín with the accent intact, and San Martín carrying the saint's title whole rather than his son's.

Commonness has a cost, and Spanish naming keeps a remedy. Where the paternal surname is too ordinary to identify anyone, the maternal one is pressed into service: Federico García Lorca is Lorca, Pablo Ruiz Picasso is Picasso, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is Zapatero. Some Martínez families fused the pair permanently instead: Martínez del Río is a Martínez that stopped being one of thousands.

Into the house of Alba in the twentieth century came Luis Martínez de Irujo, a younger son of the 9th Duke of Sotomayor. His wife Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart headed the house from 1953 until her death in 2014. Their son succeeded her as 19th Duke of Alba under both names (Carlos Fitz-James Stuart y Martínez de Irujo), with the Liria Palace in Madrid and its art and historic documents in his keeping.

Martínez de Irujo is not two surnames but one, and its shape is a Navarrese and Álavan speciality. Where Basque and Romance sat side by side, the Romance patronymic was joined to the family house or village by the particle de. José Ignacio López de Arriortúa bears a single surname although López is Castilian and Arriortúa Basque; Joaquina Sánchez de Samaniego y Fernández de Tejada carried two of them, linked by y.

The reason was practical. In Álava, and in Castile too, a man added his village to his surname precisely when the surname was too common to tell him from anyone else: the Lópezes of the valley of Ayala became López de Ayala. Martínez, standing first in Navarre's own register, was the kind of name that needed a valley behind it.

Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú, 10th Marquis of Villaverde, married into the household of Francisco Franco. His son, born in 1954, was registered not by the ordinary paternal rule but as Francisco de Asís Franco y Martínez-Bordiú, the mother's name taken first, so that the Caudillo's surname would not stop with his daughter Carmen.

The inversion was less of a novelty than it looked. Before the paternal–maternal order settled in the mid-eighteenth century, Hispanophone families often passed the mother's surname instead, or reached past both parents for a grandparent's name, when it bought the standing of gentry or flattered whoever held land worth inheriting.

Every Spaniard carries two surnames, the father's first and the mother's second, and the second is on borrowed time. When María Dolores Martínez Ruiz marries Eduardo Fernández Garrido their son is José Fernández Martínez; when José has children of his own, Martínez falls off the end and is gone. Many Martínez descents survive only in that second slot.

The law changed in 1999: parents may set the order, provided every sibling matches, and an adult may reverse their own. Almost nobody does: the traditional order is still chosen 99.53% of the time. Since 2013 a deadlock between parents is settled by an official, and since June 2017 they must sign an explicit agreement rather than let the paternal name default into place.