Origins
The hidalguía has its origins in fighting men of the Reconquista. By the tenth century the term infanzón appears in Asturian-Leonese documents as a synonym for the Spanish and Medieval Latin terms caballero and miles (both, "knight"). These infanzones were vassals of the great magnates and prelates and ran their estates for them as petty nobility. In these first centuries it was still possible to become a miles simply by being able to provide, and afford the costs of, mounted military service. Only by the mid-twelfth century did the ranks of the knights begin to be—in theory—closed by lineage. In the frontier towns that were created as the Christian kingdoms pushed into Muslim land, the caballeros, and not the magnates who often were far away, came to dominate politics, society and cultural patronage. From their ranks were also drawn the representatives of the towns and cities when the cortes were convened by kings. It was in the twelfth century that this class, along with the upper nobility, began to be referred to as hidalgos.
As surnames evolved in the first centuries of the second millennium, hidalgos, or those that aspired to the rank, adopted the use of the particle de in their surnames in a formula that distinguished what was still a true patronymic by the addition of the place or population of origin where their fief or one of their parents' seat of nobility was. So, for example, the eleventh-century infanzón, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the famous Cid Campeador of history and literature, modified his patronymic Díaz — "son of Diego" — with the main or favoured place or house among those in his family's, Vivar del Cid, although he owned and doted his wife Jimena in her legal Bridewealth document with many other places from his family's possessions, which he was equally entitled to use as name but were usually passed to be used so and as inheritance for junior branches within a same family. This formula survived for several centuries as can be evidenced in the names of many of the sixteenth-century conquistadors—Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Vasco Núñez de Balboa— who were from hidalgo families or claimed the status due to their services to the crown.
Read more about this topic: Hidalgo (Spanish Nobility)
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)