Sánchez

Following the Visigothic invasion of the Iberian peninsula the local population took up a patronymic naming system on a large scale. The Latin genitive suffix -ici, meaning son of, was fastened to the father's forename to make the name of the son, and it wore down into local forms according to the language of the district: the son of Fernando came out as Fernández in Castilian. Sancho, from the Latin Sanctius and behind that sanctus, holy, went through the same machine, and the son of a Sancho became a Sánchez.

None of this was hereditary. Álvaro, the son of Rodrigo, was Álvaro Rodríguez; his own son Juan was not Juan Rodríguez but Juan Álvarez. The name reset every generation and pointed at one man, the father. Family names in the western European sense only came into use in the 11th century, and it is across that turn that the patronymic stopped moving: the ending that had marked a father hardened into the mark of a house, inherited whether or not any Sancho stood at its head.

The system was heaviest in central Castile. Galician documents carry these patronymics from the 9th century and they spread from the 12th, preserving the medieval spelling of this one plainly: Sanches. Because the freeze caught a short list of baptismal names, a handful of surnames ended up covering an enormous population. Fernández, González, Rodríguez, Pérez, Martínez, Domínguez, López and Sánchez are the same event repeated with a different Christian name at the front. Sánchez is the fifth most common surname in Spain.

Several kings named Sancho ruled in the Christian kingdoms of Spain between the 8th and the 15th centuries, and their children took the patronymic. The clearest case is Sancho III Garcés, called the Great, king of Pamplona (980–1035). His children carried it onto thrones: García III Sánchez, king of Navarre (1015–1054); Ramiro I Sánchez, king of Aragon (1010–1063); Fernando I Sánchez, also called the Great, king of Castile and emperor of León (1020–1063); Gonzalo Sánchez, king of Huesca (1022–1054); and the infanta Urraca Sánchez.

That is the -ez system running at the top of society, and it is why the name reads as royal in a farmer's mouth. The Navarrese line also runs on: García III Sánchez had an illegitimate son whose grandson married the daughter of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, and the son of that marriage, García Ramírez, called the Restorer, became king of Navarre in his turn. The name is more than 1,300 years old and its origins lie in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and southern France; a lay Catholic recorded as Sancius, Sanctius or Sancho was martyred in 851.

In the 8th century Duke Lupus Sanchez assisted Charlemagne in taking the fortress city of Barcelona from the Muslims. He was a military power in his own right, able to mobilise a militia of 27,000 or more to garrison the fortress cities of Gascony.

The family's older tradition runs further back and reads as tradition rather than charter. It holds that the Sánchez descend from Gothic knights who escaped the invasion of 714 and settled in the hills of León, Galicia, Asturias, Burgos and the Pyrenees; that they fought under Pelayo, the Gothic king of the Asturias, at the battle of Covadonga; and that they then returned to the Pyrenees, elected Don García Ximénez as their leader, and passed down into Navarre and Aragon.

Arms followed in quantity rather than in a single grant. Dozens of coats of arms exist for Sánchez, given to individuals and passed down the male line; the most widespread shows a crowned gold eagle on a field of azure.

Spanish practice gives a person two surnames, the father's first and the mother's second, and a woman does not change hers on marriage. It was not always so. Before the middle of the 18th century Hispanophone families often transmitted the mother's surname instead, or reached past both parents for a prestigious grandparent's name. The Ley de Registro Civil of 1870 then required birth certificates to show both surnames joined by y, which is why Felipe González Márquez is legally Felipe González y Márquez.

The registry kept legislating. Article 195 of the Civil Registry Regulations, the law of 1958, forbids prefixing de to a surname except where it stops the surname being misread as a forename. Since 1999 parents may put the mother's surname first, though the traditional order is still chosen 99.53 per cent of the time.

A very common first surname pushes a person onto their second, which is how Federico García Lorca and Pablo Ruiz Picasso came to be known by the maternal half of their names. Where Sánchez sits second it simply drops out of daily use: Penélope Cruz Sánchez is known by the first of her two surnames.

Victoriano Sánchez Barcáiztegui (1826–1875) was a Spanish naval officer, remembered as a hero. Two Spanish bullfighters carried it through the 20th century: Santiago Martín Sánchez, born in 1938 and known as El Viti, and Francisco Camino Sánchez (1940–2024).

A flamenco player carried the name too, and almost nobody knows him by it. Paco de Lucía was born Francisco Gustavo Sánchez Gomes. Flamenco artists historically avoided their proper names, and the guitarist Juan Serrano gives the reason: flamenco was the music of Spain's Gypsy communities and was held disreputable, so players did not want to embarrass their families. Paco was known from infancy after his Portuguese mother, Lucía Gomes, so that de Lucía means the son of Lucía.

Miguel Dongil y Sánchez, born in 1987, is a Spanish historian, and his own name preserves the antiquated aristocratic usage of joining the two surnames with y.

Spanish tennis produced a set of siblings under this name who all turned professional: Emilio Sánchez, born in 1965, the eldest; Javier Sánchez, born in 1968; and their younger sister Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, born in 1972, the most prominent of the three. In the naming system Arantxa became widely known by both surnames at once, while her brothers are known by the paternal Sánchez alone.

The courts kept producing them: María Sánchez Lorenzo, born 1977; María José Martínez Sánchez, born 1982; José Antonio Sánchez-de Luna, born 1984; Nicolás Almagro Sanchez Rolle, born 1985. Elsewhere it turns up on the road bicycle racer Samuel Sánchez, born 1978; the water polo player Ricardo Sánchez, born 1971; the carom billiards player Dani Sánchez, born 1974; and the motorcycle racer Sara Sánchez, born 1997.

Spanish football has carried it for decades: Onésimo Sánchez, born 1968, player and later manager; Víctor Sánchez, born 1976, likewise player and manager; a second Víctor Sánchez, born 1987; Robert Sánchez, born 1997; Ricard Sánchez, born 2000; and the referee Victoriano Sánchez Arminio (1942–2023). The name is found in nearly every western European country, and France has a bench of its own in the footballer Daniel Sanchez, born 1953, and the track cyclist Clara Sanchez, born 1983.

The conquistadors took the name out of the peninsula, and colonists called Sánchez settled between the 1500s and the 1700s in what is now the southwestern United States, Mexico and South America. One arrival can be dated exactly: Sánchez colonists reached what is now New Mexico with the Juan de Oñate expedition of 1598.

Spanish naming customs travelled wherever Spanish rule reached, shaping the naming of Hispanic America and, to a different degree, of the Philippines. That matters for anyone tracing a line: the surname's presence abroad is a weak guide to descent on its own. The family's own record says as much: those who moved to the New World may share, in varying degrees, other European, Native American, African or further ancestries.

What survives all of it is the machinery. A single Castilian suffix, fixed somewhere between the 9th century and the 12th, took the name of a Navarrese king and pushed it down through a whole population until it stood fifth among the surnames of Spain. Every Sánchez carries a sentence of Latin that once meant something plain: the son of the holy one.