Morales

A moral is a mulberry, and morales is a stand of them. The name says neither who a man's father was nor what he did for a living: it says he lived by the mulberry trees. In Spain that was no decorative detail. The mulberry is the tree whose leaves the silkworm eats, planted where silk was made, which in the peninsula meant Andalusia and Murcia: an industry inherited from Al-Andalus that had made Granada and Valencia wealthy.

What hung on those leaves was the most valuable fibre in Europe. A mercer in medieval England was marked off from an ordinary merchant precisely by dealing in silk, and silk cloth went to the nobility and the church and to almost nobody else. Central Spain lived off the other fibre, its sheepwalks controlled by the Mesta and its merino guarded so closely that in the sixteenth century lambs left the country only by royal permission. Wool was Castile's. The leaf was the south's.

The heraldry agrees. Fernando González-Doria gives the principal arms as a quartered shield, first and fourth silver with three black bends, second and third silver with a mulberry tree in green. Whatever else the men who blazoned it believed, they thought the name meant a tree and put the tree on the field.

The Spanish genealogical tradition tells another story. Baños de Velasco placed the earliest solar of the Morales at Cuyedo, in the Merindad de Trasmiera in the district of Santoña, Cantabria, with the first house at Cudreya. From there, the account runs, the family passed to Soria, founded the place called Morales and held it as lords, standing among the twelve noble and troncal houses of that city, and out of it came fighting men who distinguished themselves at the conquests of Baeza and Seville.

Read that as a family's account of itself rather than as a charter: it survives in the nobiliary compilations listed beneath it, Diego Urbina's Blasones de Armas y Linajes de España among them, it carries a request for a citation, and it contradicts its own opening, which calls Morales toponymic before a later line insists it is not. Named men are firmer ground than the pedigree. Andrés de Morales, navigator and cartographer, lived long in the Antilles, drew charts of the Brazilian shore and the western islands, and founded houses of the name in Seville and Granada. Ambrosio de Morales, recorded from 1513, was a churchman and historian of the humanist generation that forced an evidence-led method onto Spanish history.

A grove is not a rare landmark, and the map shows it. Zamora alone carries four villages of the name: Morales del Vino, Morales del Rey, Morales de Toro and Morales de Valverde. There is a Morales in Soria, another in Salamanca and San Morales in the same province, one in La Rioja, Morales del Arcediano in León, Cañada Morales in Jaén, Los Morales in both Almería and Córdoba, Casillas de Morales out on Fuerteventura. No one of them can be shown to be the place the surname came from. Wherever mulberries stood thick enough to name a hamlet they were thick enough to name the family living in it, and the same surname formed over and over without the bearers being kin.

It runs heaviest today in the Canary Islands, Andalusia and Castilla-La Mancha. The Portuguese forms of the same place-word travelled further than the Spanish one: in Brazil, Moraes, Morais and Morales together account for 1,814,835 people, Moraes alone standing 45th in the country.

Cristóbal de Morales was born in Seville around 1500, took an exceptional early education there in the classics and in music, and held posts at Ávila and Plasencia. By 1535 he was in Rome, a singer in the papal choir under Paul III, who favoured Spanish singers as the Borja popes had before him. He stayed in Vatican employ until 1545, tried without success for a place with the emperor and with Cosimo I de Medici, and went home to Spanish appointments that kept going wrong; the last was maestro de capilla at Málaga Cathedral, 1551 to 1553. On 4 September 1553 he applied for the post at Toledo, where he had worked before. He died at Marchena, on a day nobody recorded, before the seventh of October.

The work is almost all sacred and all vocal: twenty-two surviving masses, more than a hundred motets, eighteen settings of the Magnificat and at least five of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, one of them surviving only in a Mexican manuscript. The theorist Juan Bermudo called him "the light of Spain in music", and in 1559 a Mexican choir sang that music at a service for the dead Charles V, which is how fast Spanish polyphony reached the New World. He was the first Spanish composer of international reputation, and the record is candid that he was hard to employ. Seville registers of his lifetime hold other Moraleses, a cathedral treasurer, a canon, a notary, and no document connects one of them to him.

Luis de Morales, 1509 to 9 May 1586, painted almost nothing but religious subjects: Madonnas with the Child, and the Passion over and over. His contemporaries called him El Divino, the Divine Morales, for his skill, for the shocking realism of the painting and for the spirituality that came off all of it. Critics divide the career in two: an early stage under Florentine influence, then a more intense and more anatomically exact one, closer to German and Flemish Renaissance work.

The Prado holds around twenty-two of his paintings, among them a Pieta and the San Juan de Ribera of 1564. The Virgen del Pajarito of 1546 is in the church of San Agustín in Madrid, another Pieta of 1560 in Badajoz Cathedral. The rest scattered: St Jerome in the Wilderness at the National Gallery of Ireland, a Christ tied to a Column at Kingston Lacy in Dorset.

Juan Bautista Morales was born at Écija around 1597 and entered the Dominicans very young. After some years of mission work in the Philippines he went with a party of Dominicans to China in 1633 and took up work in Fujian, arriving straight into the Chinese Rites controversy: Jesuits on one side, Dominicans and Franciscans on the other, the latter holding that the Jesuits tolerated the cult of Confucius and of ancestors in order to win converts.

His order sent him to Rome to argue it in 1643, and on 12 September 1645 he obtained from Innocent X a decision condemning the Jesuit methods. The Jesuits appealed and got a contradictory decree from Alexander VII. Morales put the question to the Holy See again in 1661 and died at Funing on 17 September 1664; the decree of Clement IX that finally went against the Jesuits came in 1669, five years after his death. He left a commentary on the Litanies of the Virgin and a treatise on the love of God, both in Chinese.

Bartolomé Félix Morales y Ramírez was born at Algeciras in 1737 and grew up in Seville. He held a commission in the infantry Regiment of Navarre, fought at Ceuta some time before 1763, and was posted across Cuba to Bayamo, Cobre and Holguín between 1763 and 1774, serving as lieutenant governor at Holguín. On 17 May 1766 he married María Medina Barsaga Soledad, daughter of a sergeant under his command whose family grew snuff at Santiago del Prado, where he took up the local devotion to Our Lady of Charity. Made colonel by Charles IV in 1791, he took command of the Third Battalion Cuban Regiment at the Castillo de San Marcos in St Augustine, Florida, and in March 1796 was made acting governor of East Florida while Governor Enrique White recovered from illness, handing it back in June.

He had brought two people to Florida in 1790: his daughter Rita Josefa and his infant grandson Félix Varela, whose mother, another of his daughters, had died days after the birth. Bartolomé wanted the boy in uniform and proposed a military academy at fourteen. Félix refused, saying his vocation was not to kill people but to save them, and asked for a seminary instead. He became a priest and an important figure in the history of Latin America.

Trace the name back through any of it and the road ends somewhere unremarkable: a stand of mulberries at the edge of a village, a family known for living beside them, and a leaf that fed the worm that spun the most expensive thread in Europe.