Rodrigues

The ending does the work. In Portuguese, -es on a personal name means "son of", so Rodrigues is the son of Rodrigo, or of Rui, the short form that gave Castile its Ruiz, son of Ruy. Rodrigo is Portugal's Roderick, built from the Germanic elements hrod (fame) and ric (power), from Proto-Germanic *Hrōþirīk(i)az, and it was the name of Roderic, the last Visigothic king of Iberia. Castile formed the same descent with -ez and produced Rodríguez. One letter, two countries, the same dead king.

Rodrigues sits inside a whole class of Portuguese patronymics: Henriques, Pires, Lopes, Nunes, Mendes, Fernandes, Gonçalves, Esteves, Álvares. Most have outlived the fathers they were made from: Lopes comes from the archaic Lopo, Soares from Soeiro, Mendes from Mendo, Peres from Pero, Eanes from the mediaeval Iohannes. Not every -es name is a patronymic: Tavares, Cortês and Chaves are places. Rodrigo is the rarity that never went archaic, so Rodrigues is one of the few surnames whose father is still legible.

Mediaeval Iberia did not run surnames, it ran a rolling patronymic. Álvaro, a son of Rodrigo, was Álvaro Rodríguez; his own son Juan was not Juan Rodríguez but Juan Álvarez. The name moved with every birth and no grandson kept it. In Portugal those patronymics began, many centuries ago, to be used as inherited family names, and whichever generation happened to be sons of a Rodrigo was locked into Rodrigues permanently, a timing accident rather than descent from one household, and the reason unrelated Portuguese families answer to the same name.

Because the paternal surname comes last and a Portuguese person is known by the final element, Rodrigues spends much of its life buried mid-name. The poet Francisco Rodrigues Lobo is Lobo. The actor Vasco Rodrigues Santana is Santana. Américo de Deus Rodrigues Thomaz, admiral and politician, is Thomaz. The physician João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco (1511–1568) escaped both halves of his name and is remembered by a Latin byname, Amato Lusitano, the Portuguese one.

Print reinforces it: Portuguese names are indexed by the final element, so when Rodrigues lands last the family reads as Rodrigues, and when it lands third of the four surnames a person may carry, it goes silent. The name is borne by far more people than its famous bearers suggest.

In 1497 the Jews of Portugal were forced to choose between conversion and expulsion, and scholars who traced what the converts did with their names find a consistent answer: they took a patronymic, or a godfather's surname. Plain, numerous, unreadable: a name that told the Inquisition nothing. Rodrigues, already borne by ordinary Christian households across the country, was precisely the kind of surname that could close over a family's past without leaving a seam.

The popular story prefers tree names (Carvalho, Oliveira, Pereira), but those were in Christian use through the Middle Ages, and the crypto-Jews of Belmonte carry surnames that cannot be told from old Catholic ones. The community that left instead took Camargo, Costa, Fonseca, Pimentel, Dias, Pinto and Silveira to Amsterdam and Hamburg, and produced Bento de Espinosa, known outside Portugal as Baruch Spinoza, along with Uriel da Costa, Isaac de Pinto and Menasseh ben Israel, whose family name had been Soeiro. The name is in France too: Olinde Rodrigues (1795–1851), banker and mathematician, and the physicist Claudine Hermann (1945–2021), born Rodrigues.

Diogo Rodrigues, sailing under the Portuguese viceroy Pedro Mascarenhas, came upon an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean in 1528. He was not the first there. In February 1507 the ship Cisne under Diogo Fernandes Pereira (part of the fleet of Afonso de Albuquerque and Tristão da Cunha) was pushed round Madagascar by a cyclone and raised Réunion, and the other two islands of the group were picked up afterwards. The place was called Diogo Fernandes first, then Domingo Froiz, and by 1528 it had settled on Rodrigues, which it has been ever since.

The chart-makers then fought the -es and -ez quarrel in miniature. Spanish maps wrote Diogo Rodríguez. Dutch maps wrote Diego Roiz and Diego Ruys, and one of them Diego Ruy's Island. Others mangled it into Dygarroys and Bygarroys, and some early French sources ignored the man entirely and called it Île Marianne. Arab sailors had known the Mascarenes from the tenth century, and the Cantino planisphere of about 1500 shows them as Dina Arobi, Dina Margabin and Dina Moraze. None of it held. A Portuguese patronymic, spelled the Portuguese way, is what survived.

Other bearers went out on the same tide and are better documented than the navigator. João Rodrigues Cabrilho (1497–1543) was a Portuguese explorer; Simão Rodrigues was a Portuguese Jesuit. Much later Sarmento Rodrigues (1899–1979) served as a Portuguese marine official, colonist and professor: the empire's last administrative century wearing the same surname as its first navigators.

Amália Rodrigues (1920–1999) was Portugal's fado singer. Portuguese letters carry the name too, in the poet Francisco Rodrigues Lobo and the writer Urbano Tavares Rodrigues. In politics it is thick on the ground: Ferro Rodrigues and Carmona Rodrigues, and three Portuguese politicians named Anabela: Anabela Miranda Rodrigues, Anabela Sousa Rodrigues, and the Anabela Rodrigues who sat as an MEP.

Portuguese football has run through several: Conceição Rodrigues, born in 1919, Tiago Rodrigues in 1992, Ivo Rodrigues in 1995, Nelly Rodrigues in 2003. Elsewhere in Europe, Peter Rodrigues, born 1944, was a Welsh footballer, and Kosta Rodrigues a German one.

Brazil is where the Portuguese surname stock multiplied, and Rodrigues went with it. Francisco de Paula Rodrigues Alves and Hermes Rodrigues da Fonseca both sat in Brazilian politics; Nelson Rodrigues wrote there. Brazil placed almost no law on names (only the obscene or ridiculous are refused at the cartório de registro civil), so archaic, foreign and invented spellings run beside the correct ones in a way Portugal would never allow.

One Brazilian habit matters for this name in particular. Descendants of a celebrated ancestor sometimes keep his given name and surname together as a single inherited compound, and the Lafayette Rodrigues families are among the rare handful who do it. The spread runs further: Eliane R. Rodrigues, the Brazilian-Mexican applied mathematician and statistician, the volleyball player Mônica Rodrigues, and Evan Rodrigues, born 1993, a Canadian ice hockey player.