Oliveira

Oliveira is the olive tree, from the Latin olivarius and behind it oliva. The genealogists tie the surname to one holding, the Paço de Oliveira in the freguesia of Santa Maria de Oliveira, in the concelho of Arcos de Valdevez, where the first family to use it as a hereditary name came from. It is not where every Oliveira came from: olive trees stood in too many places for that, and the name arose independently in several regions rather than descending from one line. Medieval clerks had no settled spelling for it either, and Olveira and Ulveira both appear in the legal and ecclesiastical records.

The earliest documented bearers are a father and son. Pedro de Oliveira, a nobleman of Évora, founded a rich morgadio there, an entailed estate that passed intact down his line; his son, D. Martinho Pires de Oliveira, became archbishop of Braga. By the late 13th century people of the name appear in the royal paperwork of King Dinis, who reigned from 1279 to 1325, and specifically in the Inquirições Gerais, the surveys the crown sent out to establish who held which land, under whose jurisdiction, and owing what. A surname turns up in a land survey for one reason: it is attached to land.

The older pedigrees run the family much further back, to Roman aristocrats of the gens Oliva; the charters begin in the 13th century, and that is where the evidence sits. The arms are at least as old as the rules meant to govern them, originally a blue field bearing a green olive tree, later restyled in red with the tree outlined and fruited in silver and torn up by the roots. The name then went out with the empire and with the ordinary emigration that followed it, a very long way from Arcos de Valdevez.

Francisco Xavier de Oliveira, known ever after as the Cavaleiro Oliveira, took refuge in Holland in 1740 and a year later published his Memórias das viagens de Francisco Xavier de Oliveira, four volumes of them. Among the things that struck him abroad was a small one about himself: English and Dutch acquaintances heard his surname and assumed he was Sephardic. He set it down as a curiosity, alongside what he knew of the name's roots elsewhere in Europe. He is the rare early bearer who wrote about carrying the name rather than merely appearing under it in someone else's ledger.

João Carlos de Saldanha Oliveira e Daun, first Duke of Saldanha, was born at Azinhaga on 17 November 1790, a grandson of the Marquis of Pombal who had run the kingdom for Joseph I. He studied at Coimbra, served against the French, and was taken prisoner in 1810. On his release he went to Brazil and worked in the military and diplomatic services there, coming home only after Brazil declared its independence.

From the revolution of 1820 until his death he was the dominating figure in Portuguese war and politics, and he led no fewer than seven coups d'état. He was Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1825 and governor of Porto in 1826 and 1827; when the brothers Pedro and Miguel went to war he took Pedro's side, fighting in the Belfastada, the Siege of Porto and the Battle of Almoster. In 1833 he was made Marshal of Portugal, and the following year he concluded the Concession of Evoramonte with the defeated Miguel, closing the Liberal Wars.

Minister of War and President of the Council in 1835, he resigned within the year, instigated the revolution of 1836, and went into exile until 1846. On his return he was created Duke of Saldanha and formed a ministry that fell in 1849; in 1851 he organised a fresh revolt and became chief minister at the head of a coalition of Septembrists and disaffected Chartists, holding power until Pedro V came to the throne in 1856. He was prime minister once more for a few months in 1870 and ambassador to London from 1871, where he died on 20 November 1876.

Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins was born in Lisbon on 30 April 1845 and died there on 24 August 1894. Orphaned young, he never finished school, went into business between 1858 and 1870, and when the firm failed took work managing a mine in Andalusia. He came back to Portugal in 1874 to coordinate the building of the railway from Porto to Póvoa de Varzim and Vila Nova de Famalicão. None of that reads like the making of a national historian, and all of it is how he became one.

Porto made him president of its Sociedade de Geografia Comercial in 1880 and manager of its Museum of Industry and Commerce four years later. He was elected deputy for Viana do Castelo in 1883 and for Porto in 1889, and became the 47th Minister for Treasury Affairs on 17 January 1892.

The books outlasted the offices. História da Civilização Ibérica and História de Portugal both appeared in 1879, O Brasil e as Colónias Portuguesas in 1880, Os Filhos de D. João I in 1891 and A Vida de Nuno Álvares in 1893, the last a life of the Constable Nuno Álvares Pereira. He belonged to the generation of the 70s alongside Antero de Quental, Eça de Queirós and Ramalho Ortigão, preferred narrative history to any science of universal laws, and was attacked by integralist writers for pessimism and even anti-patriotism. His readers included António Sérgio and the philosopher Eduardo Lourenço.

José Alberto de Oliveira Anchieta was born in Lisbon on 9 October 1832. He began mathematics at Coimbra, did not settle, and moved to the Escola Politécnica in Lisbon. In 1857 a close friend went out to Cape Verde and Anchieta followed him, working on the flora and fauna of Santo Antão and acting as an amateur physician on the strength of some medical study. A cholera epidemic killed most of the islanders and nearly killed him too. He tried medicine properly in Lisbon, London and Paris, never finished, and went back to Africa instead.

In 1865 he sailed for Angola again, this time with his wife, and set up a laboratory inside the ruins of a church in the Benguela region. In 1867 the government engaged him, ostensibly as a naturalist, at Caconda on the far edge of the territory, though the likelier reading is that he was also there as an informer. He stayed thirty years, sending specimens and letters back to J. V. Barboza du Bocage in Lisbon and working in the local hospital, where the population thought well of him.

By Bocage's count he was responsible for 25 new species of mammals, 46 of birds and 46 of amphibians and reptiles. He could not be bothered to write the papers, leaving that to his correspondents, so the credit went into the names instead: Anchieta's sunbird, Anchieta's cobra, Anchieta's dwarf python, Anchieta's chameleon, Anchieta's antelope, all of them anchietae. He died in 1897, at 66, coming back from an expedition to Caconda, worn down by years of malaria. Most of the specimens and nearly all of his letters to Bocage burned in a museum fire in 1978.

João Joaquim Marques da Silva Oliveira was born in Porto on 23 August 1853 and entered the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes there in 1864, aged eleven. He took the history painting course under João António Correia, graduated in 1873, and spent the next six years in France with his colleague António da Silva Porto, both studying at the École des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel and Adolphe Yvon. The work that came out of those years got him into the Salons of 1876 and 1878.

He came home to Porto in 1879 and helped introduce plein-air painting to Portugal, taking the easel outdoors as a matter of course. From 1881 to 1926 he taught at the Academy in Porto and eventually directed it, with Aurélia de Sousa and Lino António among his pupils, and he was made director of the reorganised Soares dos Reis National Museum in 1913. He gave all of it up in 1926 at the compulsory retirement age for public employees, and died the next year in the city he had never really left. A bronze bust of him went up in 1929 in the Jardim de São Lázaro, next to the Academy.