Ortiz

Almost every common Spanish surname ends in -ez. Ortiz does not, and that is the story of the name. The Latin genitive -ici, son of, decayed differently in each of the peninsula's languages: -ez in Castilian, -es in Galician and Portuguese, -i in Asturian, -is in Catalan, -itz in Basque. A name reaching the present in -iz was fixed in writing along the northern arc where Basque and Romance had shared the same valleys for centuries.

Koldo Mitxelena read Ortí and Ortiz as the Basque working-out of Fortunio, the Latin name of a fortunate man, which gives Fortún, Ortún and Ortuño once the intervocalic n falls away; the Castilian line off the same root, on his account, is Ordóñez. Esteban de Garibay saw the mechanism in the sixteenth century, noting that a Basque speaker naming Ortuño de Mendoza says Hurti Mendozaco, because Hurti is Ortuño. Francisco Piferrer, admitting the etymology was not easy, preferred a tradition bringing the family over the Pyrenees from Normandy, the gold star in its arms read as the star of the north: a genealogist reading a picture.

The oldest houses of the name sat in Aragón, Navarre and the lordship of Vizcaya, the densest band of them in the mountain country between Burgos and the Basque provinces. From the twelfth century there are Ortiz families at Villacarriedo in Santander, in the Valle de Mena and at Espinosa de los Monteros: valley householders in the one corner of Iberia whose lords answered to Pamplona and Zaragoza rather than Toledo.

The documentary trail begins early and stays northern. The first firm date usually given is 1014, when García Ortiz confirmed a donation as a ricohombre of the king of Navarre. The Anales Valencianos put Ortum Ortiz, son of Garcés Ortiz, ricohombre of Aragón, in the record for 1149. An Ortún Ortiz was alcalde of Toledo in 1167; in 1214 another confirmed a donation as ricohombre and merino mayor to the king of Castile; Ortún Ortiz Calderón was at the taking of Baeza.

In country where Basque and Romance had long overlapped, a surname was built in two halves: the Romance patronymic, the particle de, then the house or village the man came from, the whole counting as one name. That is why the record fills with Ortiz de Retes, Ortiz de Zárate, Ortiz de Zúñiga, Ortiz de Landázuri. The pattern was abandoned across most Basque-speaking ground and survived chiefly in central Navarre and most of Álava, which is where the archived Ortiz come from.

One further northern peculiarity carried the name across an ocean. Before the twentieth century every Basque man was reckoned noble, and many used that standing to emigrate on privileged terms into the Spanish empire, above all to the Americas. The hidalguía a Castilian family spent generations proving in court was, in Álava and Vizcaya, simply assumed. An Ortiz with no title and no fortune could still sail as a gentleman.

Yñigo Ortiz de Retes was born at Retes de Llanteno in Álava, in the first decade of the sixteenth century, into exactly such an untitled hidalgo family. He appears first on Alvarado's expedition of 1538 to the governorship of Guatemala and Honduras, and in 1541 in the force that relieved the siege of Nochistlán during the Mixtón war. Posted in 1542 to López de Villalobos's expedition to the Islas de Poniente, he was promoted maestre de campo on reaching Mindanao in February 1543.

When Bernardo de la Torre failed to find a northern route back to Mexico, Villalobos sent him to try a southern one. He left Tidore on 16 May 1545 commanding the San Juan de Letrán and coasted the northern shore of a very large island until wind and current turned him back at five degrees south. On 20 June, at the mouth of the river he charted as the San Agustín and the maps now call the Mamberamo, he took possession for the Spanish crown and named the island Nueva Guinea, thinking its people resembled those of the Guinea coast.

Two men of the name governed the Río de la Plata in turn. Francisco Ortiz de Vergara, born in Seville, served there under Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, stayed loyal after his chief was deposed, conspired against the replacement Martínez de Irala, and ended by marrying Irala's daughter rather than on a scaffold. Arrested at Chuquisaca, he was replaced by Juan Ortiz de Zárate, born at Orduña in 1526 and in Peru by 1534: a partisan of Almagro at Las Salinas, then with Diego Centeno against Gonzalo Pizarro in Charcas, a fugitive at Quito, at last among the richest residents of Chuquisaca. He sailed home to have his governorship confirmed, came back to fit out new expeditions, and finally obtained the government of Paraguay he had wanted all along. He died at Asunción.

Diogo Ortiz de Vilhegas, born at Calzadilla about 1457, went into Portugal in 1476 in the train of the Castilian princess Joanna la Beltraneja. He advised John II and Manuel I, and was made bishop of Tangier in 1491, of Ceuta in 1500 and of Viseu in 1505, where he put the cathedral through a thorough artistic remodelling. His counsel to the crown was on astronomy and navigation, in the decades when those were its most valuable subjects; Manuel I made him tutor to the heir who became John III.

Diego Ortiz, born at Toledo around 1510, was living in the viceroyalty of Naples by 1553 and in 1558 was made maestro di cappella of its Chapel Royal by the third duke of Alba. His Trattado de Glosas, published at Rome on 10 December 1553, is the first manual of ornamentation written for bowed strings and a founding text for the viola da gamba. Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz, of Villanueva de Gállego in Zaragoza province, took the Medal of Honour at the National Exhibition of 1878 with his Doña Juana la Loca, and the Senate answered by commissioning La Rendición de Granada.

Andalusia gave the name its grandest line. Don Pedro Ortiz distinguished himself in the fighting before Seville fell, about 1247; his grandson Alonso de Ortiz, comendador of the Order of Santiago, married Mencía de Zúñiga, and from that match came the marquises of Monte-Fuerte. Juan Ortiz de Zúñiga, knight of Santiago and veinticuatro perpetuo of Seville, was created first marquis by Philip V in 1702.

Not every official verdict was flattering. Officers of the Inquisition at Toledo wrote in the 1590s that this surname Ortiz, although they have few sanbenitos, is in this city a very converso lineage and surname. The tribunals read a surname as a lineage and kept lists accordingly, and the families listed spent generations holding their standing against it.

Domingo Antonio Ortiz Mereles, born at Caraguatay in 1832, trained as a gunner under a Brazilian military mission and entered the Paraguayan navy in 1853. At Riachuelo he commanded the Yporá, a five-gun steamer and the first warship built in Paraguay; at Itapirú and Curupayty he served the guns himself, promoted lieutenant for the one and made an officer of the National Order of Merit for the other. In 1888, as capitán de navío, he retook Bahía Negra from the Bolivian force that had held it since 1885.

Pascual Ortiz Rubio, born at Morelia in Michoacán in 1877 and trained as an engineer at the Colegio de San Nicolás, was jailed by Victoriano Huerta in 1913, joined Carranza's Constitutionalist army and rose to brigadier general, governed Michoacán from 1917 and was ambassador to Germany and to Brazil. Elected president of Mexico in November 1929, he was shot in the jaw on the day he took office. He governed in the shadow of Plutarco Elías Calles and would not go on doing it: he resigned on 2 September 1932, in his own words with his hands clean of blood or money.

The name kept its northern shape and its reach. Brazil's register counts 42,003 people called Ortiz, ranking it 486th there, with a further 6,959 spelling it Ortis. In Spain it sits inside the royal style: Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano, born in 1972, is queen, and her daughter Leonor, born in 2005, is Princess of Asturias under the name Borbón y Ortiz. A patronymic the Castilian machine never touched, made out of Fortún in the hill country of Navarre and Álava, is carried today by the heir to the Spanish throne.