Ruiz

Ruiz is a patronymic in the full sense: son of Ruy. Ruy, sometimes written Rui, was the ordinary Spanish spelling of Rodrigo through the high and central Middle Ages, a clipping so usual that the Cid stands in the record as often as Ruy Díaz as he does as Rodrigo. Behind both forms lies a Germanic name, latinised as Rodericus and meaning rich in glory and in goods, which Castilian households never stopped using.

That makes Ruiz and Rodríguez twins off one root by two roads, the one long and the one worn short. A tradition, asserted rather than documented, holds that where the name was borne by Jewish families it was read differently again, as Ben David, son of King David. And because a patronymic can be minted wherever a father is called Ruy, the surname has no single fountainhead: houses of Ruiz with no relation to each other stand along the whole northern slope of medieval Spain, from Álava and Vizcaya through Burgos to the Cantabrian valleys.

The house reckoned among the oldest of the name stood at Viérgol, in the Valle de Mena in the north of Burgos province, in the judicial district of Villarcayo. Its claim to age rests on what its men did in the campaigns of Fernando III of Castile: some of the three hundred knights granted estates at Baeza after he took the city came out of Viérgol, and others of the name received repartimientos, shares of conquered ground, at Córdoba and at Seville.

The Valle de Mena also sent the Ruiz who fought at the taking of Jaén under Fernando III, the king Spain remembers as el Santo. They were caballeros to a man, several of them ranked as ricoshombres, and the land handed to them in Córdoba and Seville was the crown's payment for that service. An hidalguía confirmed that way, at a king's side and on a new frontier, was worth more to the family's later generations than any pedigree, because it was on record.

From the solar at Viérgol came the branch that founded the house in the Valle de Losa, and another that settled at Navamuel, in the municipality of Valderredible in the Reinosa district of Cantabria. Castilian genealogy tracks a family by the ground each branch stopped on, and the Burgos Ruiz left a long list of stops: the villa of Belorado, the villa of Medina de Pomar in the Villarcayo district, Quintanilla del Rebollar in the Merindad de Sotoscueva, and Atapuerca in the district of Burgos itself.

None of these were great seats. They were valley villages and small towns of the province, and the Ruiz in them were the class of family that held land, bore arms when called, and kept its papers. What survives of them is almost entirely documentary, and the documents are nearly all of one kind: proofs, granted or contested, that the family was hidalgo and carried the exemption that went with the rank.

On 20 August 1465, at Simancas, Enrique IV of Castile granted Martín Ruiz, of the house of Quintanilla del Rebollar, a privilege of hidalguía and exemption. The grant was made to a man, and a grant made to a man dies with him unless somebody troubles to have it renewed.

Four of his sons troubled. Sancho, Martín, García and Lope Ruiz petitioned for confirmation of their father's privilege and received it from the Catholic Monarchs, in a royal letter given at Seville on 20 May 1478. Two reigns, two chanceries, one standing kept alive because the sons asked in time. Everything the family could later claim in Sotoscueva rested on those two sheets of parchment.

The Real Chancillería de Valladolid was where a Castilian family went when its hidalguía was challenged, and Ruiz families went there again and again. In 1586 Andrés and Juan Ruiz, of Quintanilla del Rebollar and of Redondo in the same Merindad de Sotoscueva, were pleading such a suit, and what they laid before the court was Martín Ruiz's privilege of 1465 together with the confirmation of 1478. The record does not make them Martín's descendants. It makes them the men who still had his papers.

The Ruiz of Atapuerca had stood before the same court earlier in that same century, winning an ejecutoria de hidalguía on 6 May 1548, the form of judgment that put the question beyond further argument. Between them the two cases show what the surname's early history actually consists of: not battles after the thirteenth century, but a long defence of what the battles had earned.

In Álava the name sat at Hetura, in the municipality of Barrundia in the judicial district of Vitoria, and from Hetura a branch moved to Andicana, another village of the same Barrundia. Álava was not a terminus. Ruiz families out of the province crossed into Navarre and stayed there, while others went into Guipúzcoa and took up residence at Oñate, where they proved their hidalguía in 1592.

Proving hidalguía was a local business as much as a royal one. A town wanted to know whether a newcomer would pay what its other householders paid, and until he had shown his standing the exemption meant nothing inside its bounds. A family that kept moving, as these Ruiz did, proved the same thing over and again in one jurisdiction after another, which is why so much of the early record of the name is litigation rather than chronicle.

The Andicana branch produced Francisco Antonio Ruiz de Alegría, whose surname carries the Álavan habit of fusing a patronymic to a house or a place into one name rather than two. When he left Barrundia for Salinas de Añana, a villa in the Vitoria district, and set up as a resident there, the move obliged him to prove his condition as an hidalgo; he did so before the Real Chancillería de Valladolid on 20 September 1780. The court that had given Atapuerca its ejecutoria in 1548 was still, in 1780, the court that settled the question.

Vizcaya held hidalgo houses of the name too, one in the anteiglesia of Mallavia in the Marquina district and one at Santecilla in the Valle de Carranza, district of Valmaseda. Set out together, Álava, Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, Navarre, Burgos and Cantabria give the Ruiz an almost unbroken band across the Christian north, which is what a patronymic struck independently in many places looks like once it is put on a map.

The name crossed to the Americas with the conquest and then with the colony. Because New Granada was the seat of government, most who came settled on the cundiboyacense plateau and in the mountains of Santander, and the first to plant the name there were hidalgos in their own right. Alonso Ruiz, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, went over with Cortés and established himself in Mexico City; a separate Ruiz presence in the municipality of Acambay in the State of Mexico dates only from the end of the nineteenth century.

In Brazil the surname stayed a minority one, brought by Hispanic immigration rather than by conquest: 36,157 Brazilians carry it, ranking it 535th in the country. In Spain it stayed anything but rare, and its most famous bearer is known by the other half of his name. Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Ruiz first, and the Spanish habit of reaching for the maternal surname when the paternal one identifies far too many people took the Ruiz off him for good.