Pereira

Pereira is a pear tree, from the Latin pirum or pyrus. It began as a plain topographic label: the family who lived beside the pear orchard, or on the feudal estate of Pereira in Portugal named for one. Portuguese and Galician surnames are thick with trees (Oliveira the olive, Carvalho the oak, Pinheiro the pine) because a tree was the one landmark a neighbour could not argue with.

One complication matters for anyone reading old documents. In older Portuguese records Pereira also appears as a variant of Pedreira or Pedreiro, the stone quarry and the mason. Most Pereiras are of the pear tree; a minority may descend from a quarry family, and the two are not always separable in the earliest paperwork.

When Ferdinand I of Portugal died without a male heir, the crown passed in principle to John I of Castile, husband of Ferdinand's daughter Beatriz. For the merchants of Lisbon, union with Castile meant cutting the trade links with England and northern Europe on which the city lived, and they and the lesser nobles backed John, Master of Avis, instead. The country split castle by castle: the alcaide of Óbidos declared for Castile against the wishes of the town he guarded.

The Master's forces survived the siege of Lisbon in 1384 and the Cortes at Coimbra elected him king as John I. In August 1385 the Castilian army was beaten at Aljubarrota by Portuguese and English troops under Nuno Álvares Pereira, the King's Constable and commander of the royal host. João Gonçalves, the alcaide who chose Castile, was killed in the fighting and his son surrendered Óbidos. Portuguese independence, a live question for two years, was not seriously reopened for two centuries, won under a commander whose surname was a pear tree.

The Constable was not the only Pereira in that war. On 8 April 1385 John I granted the Castle of Santa Maria da Feira to Álvaro Pereira, cousin of the Constable, after Gonçalo Vasques Coutinho took it with men and supplies from Porto. No minor prize: Alfonso III of León founded the district of the Terra de Santa Maria on this fortress in 868, and in the 1120s the lords south of the Minho gathered here around Afonso Henriques before São Mamede.

In 1448 the castle went to Fernão Pereira under an obligation to rebuild it, and under the Pereiras it stopped being a frontier post and became a palace; the watchtowers, the conical turrets and the late-15th-century adaptations for gunpowder artillery are all theirs. The line of the Counts of Feira died out in 1700 and a fire on 15 January 1722 left the place ruinous, but after the civil war of 1828–1834 a General Francisco Xavier da Silva Pereira bought the burnt ruins at auction.

After John I's accession the Castle of Evoramonte and its lands went to the Constable himself, and he passed them to his grandson. Begun in 1160 on the escarpment of the Serra d'Ossa, it was rebuilt by Teodósio I, Duke of Braganza, then master of the region: a rectangular block with cylindrical towers moulded into its corners, cannon emplacements pierced through them, each storey ringed by a knotted-rope Manueline cornice, finished in 1531.

History came back to it: on 26 May 1834 the Convention of Evoramonte was signed inside these walls, ending the Liberal Wars between Queen Maria II's forces and the Absolutist armies of Miguel. The castle a Pereira was given for saving the dynasty in 1385 is where that dynasty's last civil war was closed out.

The Constable's most consequential act after Aljubarrota was a marriage. His daughter Beatriz married Afonso, 1st Duke of Braganza, and that union began the House of Braganza, in time the greatest landed house in Portugal, seated at Vila Viçosa, where Portuguese political weight settled after Philip II of Spain inherited the kingdom in 1580.

It ended where you would expect: on 1 December 1640 conspirators stormed the royal palace in Lisbon and acclaimed the Duke of Braganza king as John IV, and the house held the throne from that day. It reached beyond Portugal: Pedro I of Brazil, also Pedro IV of Portugal (1798–1834), carried Bragança at the end of his name, and his son Pedro II of Brazil after him: all of them descended from the Constable's daughter.

Pereira carries a second history alongside the first. In 1497 the Jews living in Portugal were forced to choose between conversion and expulsion, and a durable popular belief holds that those who converted took tree names (Pereira, Oliveira, Carvalho) as cover. The honest version is the better one. Christians had borne these names throughout the Middle Ages, the Constable's family among them. What is documented is that conversos, the New Christians, used them widely through the centuries of the Inquisition, and that Sephardic families reshaped names they already held into Portuguese-looking forms: Menasseh becoming Meneses.

So a Pereira may descend from a Christian family of the pear orchard, or from a Sephardic family who took or adapted the name under the pressure of 1497, and no rule of thumb tells them apart. What is certain is that the Sephardic diaspora carried Pereira to Amsterdam, London, the Caribbean and the Americas, where it is still recognised alongside Mendes and Nunes as a name of the Portuguese Jews.

The Constable's own name shows how Portuguese names work. Medieval Iberia ran on a shifting patronymic: Álvaro's son Rodrigo would be Rodrigo Álvares, and Rodrigo's son not Álvares but Rodrigues, the name changing every generation. Nuno Álvares Pereira is Nuno, son of Álvaro, of the Pereira family, the old system and the new hereditary surname in one man's name. The patronymics froze in the end too, where -es means son of; the toponymics froze harder, because the orchard did not move.

Portuguese law lets a child carry up to four surnames, two from each parent, so the name multiplies rather than thins. Pereira ranks fifth in Brazil, borne by 6,888,212 people on IBGE's count, a foundational surname of a country built largely by Portuguese emigration. It went in every direction the Portuguese did: Pereyra or Perera in Galicia and Spanish-speaking America, Pereire in France, and common in Goa and Sri Lanka, where it came with the empire and with baptism rather than by descent. In the United States it landed hardest in Massachusetts, where many Portuguese immigrants Americanised Pereira into Perry.