Martins

Martins is a patronymic, and a plain one: son of Martim, the Portuguese form of Martin. Behind Martim stands Martin of Tours, the Roman cavalryman remembered for sharing his cloak with a beggar, and behind the saint stands the Latin Mars, the war god whose name he carried.

Most Portuguese patronymics end in -es, and they include many of the country's commonest surnames: Henriques, Pires, Rodrigues, Lopes, Nunes, Mendes, Fernandes, Gonçalves, Esteves, Álvares. Martins is one of the few that does not. A small group took -iz instead (Muniz, son of Monio; Ruiz, son of Ruy), and another took -ins, which is where Martins sits. The same construction was made over in language after language: Martinsson in Sweden, Mortensen in the north, Martini in Italy, Martínez in Castile, Martinov to the Slavic east, Maartens in the Low Countries.

Before the Romans reached the territory of present-day Portugal, people carried a single name, or a name followed by a patronym, and those names were ethnic markers: Celtic Mantaus, Lusitanian Casae, Iberian Sunua, Conii Alainus. Roman naming was taken up only slowly after the first century AD, and what came out of that borrowing was a system in which a man's second name was his father's and nothing more permanent.

Medieval Iberia ran it strictly. In Spain, Álvaro, son of Rodrigo, was Álvaro Rodríguez; but Álvaro's son Juan was not Juan Rodríguez, he was Juan Álvarez. The label stepped down the line one generation at a time and never settled. Only when those patronymics stopped moving did they become surnames.

Freezing left many of them unreadable. Lopes preserves a Lopo, Mendes a Mendo or Mem, Soares a Soeiro, Muniz a Munio, Sanches a Sancho, and not one of those given names survives in ordinary use. Others drifted: Antunes from Antão, Peres from Pero (the old form of Pedro), Alves worn down from Álvares, Eanes from the mediaeval Iohannes. Martins escaped both fates, because Martim stayed a living name and the surname never stopped announcing what it meant. The oldest bearer the record holds, Pedro Martins, Lord of the Tower of Vasconcelos, born 1160, a Portuguese noble knight, sits at the edge of that change, at a point where Martins could still be describing his own father rather than his house.

Portuguese law requires a child to have at least one personal name and one surname from a parent, and caps the result at two personal names and four surnames. Maternal surnames usually come first and paternal last, though the reverse is allowed. Where the father is unknown or has not acknowledged the child, only the mother's names are used, and a child may reach back past both parents to an ancestor's surname if the parents can prove the ancestor used it.

So Martins can occupy almost any slot in a name, and a bearer may not be called by it at all. A married woman with two personal names and six surnames is unremarkable: two from her mother, two from her father, two from her husband. Filing them is its own discipline. Schools and official documents alphabetise from the personal names forward, because so many people use different combinations day to day; directories take the last surname and drop the connectives, so Luiz Pereira da Silva is Mr Silva and never Mr da Silva.

Portuguese names are treated as ordinary nouns and bound by ordinary spelling rules: the Acordo Ortográfico, in force in Portugal and Brazil alike, holds that names of people and places, if Portuguese or naturalised into Portuguese, obey the same rules as any other word. In Portugal the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado enforces that with a defined list of permitted personal names, refusing archaic forms and any name carrying k, y or w, so Luiz gives way to Luís. Anyone registered long ago under the old spelling keeps it for life.

Surnames are the exception, with no legal restriction at all, which is why families still sign themselves Athayde and Telles where the modern forms are Ataíde and Teles. Brazil has no name laws whatever: the cartório de registro civil refuses only an obscene or ridiculous name, so Felipe, the traditional Philippe and the invented Fellype all coexist. Only the dead are held to the standard and respelled to current rules: Luís de Camões, not Luiz de Camoens.

A woman taking her husband's surname was not originally Portuguese or Brazilian practice at all. It spread through the upper classes late in the nineteenth century under French influence, and after the 1940s hardened into something close to obligation: a woman who did not do it risked being read as a concubine, and that reading persisted into the 1970s. Portugal made it optional again in 1977, Brazil during the 1970s, and since 1977 in Portugal and 2002 in Brazil a husband may take his wife's surname as readily as she takes his. In 2012 a circuit of the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice extended the right to a woman in a common-law marriage.

A Portuguese surname in Brazil does not by itself prove Portuguese ancestry. Until abolition, enslaved people in Brazil had no surnames, only personal names; they were forbidden their African names and christened with a Portuguese one, distinct only within the plantation they belonged to. Freeing a person commonly meant naming them after their former owner, so their descendants carry that owner's Portuguese surname. Indigenous Brazilians who were not enslaved often took their godparents' surnames instead.

Two patterns follow. Religious surnames, the de Jesus and dos Reis and da Conceição class, run heavier among Brazilians of African or indigenous descent than among those of purely European descent. And names already common were handed out because they were common, which is how Silva became the great Brazilian surname: 34,030,104 bearers, better than one Brazilian in six.

The documented Portuguese Martins cluster around medicine, the church, letters and public office. Manuel António Martins (1772-1845) was a businessman and colonial governor of Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea. António Alves Martins (1808-1882) was a bishop. José Tomás de Sousa Martins (1843-1897) was a doctor and Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins (1845-1894) a writer; both carry Martins last, which is why both are known and filed by it rather than by the Sousa or the Oliveira in front. The church presence ran on into the twentieth century with Manuel da Silva Martins (1927-2017), a Catholic bishop, and José Saraiva Martins, born 1932, a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.

Sport and the arts carry the rest. António Martins (1892-1930) shot for Portugal and Ângelo Martins (1930-2020) played football; the cyclists come in a run of their own, Ramiro Martins born 1941, José Freitas Martins born 1951, Maria Martins born 1999. Ana Filipa Martins, born 1996, is an artistic gymnast, Filipa Martins, born 1992, a sprinter, and Tiago Martins, born 1980, a referee. In the arts there is the photographer and author Edgar Martins, born 1977, the film and theatre director Marco Martins, born 1972, the writer Rui Cardoso Martins, born 1967, and the saxophonist and composer Carlos Martins, born 1961. Zita Martins, born 1979, is an astrobiologist.

Martins travelled with its speakers and settled. Sara Martins, born 1977, is a French-Portuguese actress; Christopher Martins, born 1997, and Leandro Barreiro Martins, born 2000, are Luxembourgish footballers; Victor Martins, born 2001, races cars in France. Charles Frédéric Martins (1806-1889) was a French physician, botanist, geologist and translator, and Robert Martins (1822-1904) held the world draughts championship for Britain. The name is not a clan and never was: it is the record of a saint popular enough that fathers across Portugal named their sons for him, and of the moment those sons' names stopped changing and became their families' own.