Mendoza

Mendoza is Basque before it is anything else: mendi, mountain, joined to hotza, the cold one, with the definite article fused on the end. The affricate written tz in Basque softened into the Spanish z. The family's records reach back into the Middle Ages in Álava, and its own tradition puts the origin with the old Lords of Llodio.

The most distinguished branch belongs to the village of Mendoza near Vitoria-Gasteiz, which by one account took its name from the family and by another gave the family its name. An Íñigo López de Mendoza of that branch made his name at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, probably under the Navarrese banner, and built the ancestral Tower of Mendoza, which still stands. His doubled surname is an Álavan habit: there a common patronymic was pinned to the family's place with the particle de, meaning 'from' rather than noble.

Álava is hill country with a flat core, the Plains of Álava, and in the 13th and 14th centuries it lay hard against Castile and Navarre, keeping customs of its own. The town of Mendoza and the province around it were a battlefield where the noble families of the region settled their disputes. By 1332 the Mendozas had been there at least a century, contending with the Ayala, the Orozco and the Velasco, and reckoning themselves a stem of the House of Haro.

When the seigneury of Mendoza passed into the Kingdom of Castile under Alfonso XI (1312–1350), the family went with it, and Mendozas begin to appear in Castilian politics as advisers, administrators and clerics. As knights and free men they entered the nobility as hidalgos at the annexation.

Gonzalo Yáñez de Mendoza was the first of the name to hold high place in Castile. He fought in the Reconquista at the Battle of Río Salado in 1340 and at the Siege of Algeciras of 1342–44, and served Alfonso XI as chief huntsman. He settled at Guadalajara and ruled the town after marrying the sister of Íñigo López de Orozco, another man out of Álava, who had been made mayor there in reward for military service.

That sequence became the method of the house: serve the king in war, take the office that follows, then marry it into power and wealth. Guadalajara, won that way, became the Castilian anchor of a family out of Álava.

Pedro González de Mendoza (1340–1385), Gonzalo's son, came through the Castilian civil war on the side of his stepbrother Henry II against Pedro the Cruel, and the choice made the family, because Henry's line won. At Nájera he was taken prisoner by Edward, the Black Prince, and released once Edward left for England. He was a poet too, his work running from the Galician tradition to a serrana and coplas of a Jew's love.

He is remembered above all for Aljubarrota. In a Castilian defeat, King John I's horse died under him, and Pedro gave the king his own mount so that he could get clear of the field. Pedro was left with no way out and was killed there. The service was not forgotten, and the house went on rising on it.

Diego Hurtado de Mendoza inherited his father Pedro's fortunes and enlarged them twice by marriage. His first wife was an illegitimate daughter of Henry II; his second was Leonor Lasso de la Vega, an exceptionally powerful widow and head of the House of Lasso de la Vega, a match that brought both families and their titles together under the House of Mendoza.

Henry III appointed him Admiral of Castile and he commanded the fleet against Portugal. When he died he was counted among the richest men in Castile. The 15th century then belonged to two Mendozas above all: Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana, who gave Castile a poet of the Renaissance, and the cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, whose weight in church and state opened the offices of the south to his kinsmen.

In 1475 building began on a Romanesque-Mudéjar hermitage beside the river Manzanares: the New Castle of Manzanares el Real, a residential palace of the House of Mendoza rather than a stronghold, larger and more luxurious than the old fortress nearby, which was abandoned to it. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, 1st Duke of the Infantado, did not live to see it finished.

It is granite, at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama, ringed by a barbican pierced with loopholes and carved in low relief with the cross of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, a title held by Pedro González de Mendoza. Its life as a palatial residence lasted a century, to the death in 1566 of Íñigo López de Mendoza y Pimentel, 4th Duke of the Infantado. The Duchy of the Infantado owns it still and leases it to the Community of Madrid as a museum of Spanish castles.

Íñigo López de Mendoza y Quiñones, second Count of Tendilla, was reckoned the most capable of Santillana's grandsons. Through his uncle the cardinal he was made captain general of Granada and governor of the Alhambra, and in the succession disputes after 1504 he was one of very few Castilian nobles who stayed loyal to Ferdinand the Catholic. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Count of Mélito, served as viceroy of Valencia in the first years of Charles V.

Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, the Count of Mélito's granddaughter, married Ruy Gómez de Silva in 1553, and in 1559 the couple were made Princes of Éboli; until Ruy Gómez died in 1573 their household was the centre of a court party that argued for a Spain open to new ideas. Lope Hurtado de Mendoza, born in 1499 and too young a son to inherit, went to court instead and rose to the Council of the Kingdom, the governorship of Oran and embassies to Portugal, Germany and Rome.

Before the 20th century every Basque man was held to be noble, and that standing let Basques emigrate with privileges into the rest of the Spanish Empire, above all the Americas. Mendoza went by that road, and from the discovery of America onwards many of the family sailed with it. Antonio de Mendoza went out as the first viceroy of New Spain, and a city in Argentina carries the name still.

In the Basque country the older shapes of the word survive: at Erandio a farmhouse called mendotza was written mendontze in the 1890s and mendotxe in the 1980s before the original spelling came back. The Tower of Mendoza still stands, and the name it carries still says cold mountain.