Record and gap

A. Iberian surnames in the Americas

The migration of Iberian surnames such as Martinez to Latin America was facilitated by Spanish colonization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁵ The patronymic tradition, combined with the imposition of Spanish naming conventions on indigenous populations, produced a tapestry of surnames reflecting both European and local influences.⁵

The prevalence of Martinez in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, and the United States illustrates the global diffusion of Iberian names through colonization, migration, and diaspora.⁵

B. The migration of Robert across Europe

Robert spread across Europe through conquest, religious conversion, and cultural exchange. Adoption by royalty and nobility facilitated integration into local naming systems; adaptability enabled numerous variants and surnames.

• Norman Conquest: introduction of Robert to England and replacement of Old English cognates.
• Christianization: adoption of Christian names in newly converted regions, often replacing indigenous names.
• Surname formation: given names become surnames through patronymic, toponymic, or occupational processes.³

C. Nuevo León: a living Villarreal geography

The habitational surname Villarreal — “one who came from a royal village” — is densest, in Mexico, in Nuevo León. Compiled public-name files put about a third of Mexican Villarreals in that state, with further clusters in Coahuila and Tamaulipas; in Monterrey municipality the name sits around rank 17, roughly one in 137 people.³⁴ That is saturation of a later cohort. It is not a 1274 founding clause.

Two place-names write the surname back onto land. Los Villarreales is an INEGI rural locality (190450118) in Salinas Victoria, about forty kilometres north of Monterrey, inside the metropolitan area: 633 inhabitants in 2020.³⁵ Postal and land language also says ejido, hacienda, ranchos and quintas. Hotel La Mansión Villarreal occupies the 1893 warehouse of Fábricas Apolo at Pino Suárez and Carlos Salazar, Centro; INAH catalogued the building and already recorded the hotel as La Mansión Villa Real in 2009.³⁶ Two orthographies of the same form. Neither place is Vila-real in Castellón.

Place → surname (Iberia, 1274 and after) and surname → place (Nuevo León) are opposite transonymizations. “Villarreal de los Monterrey” is a disambiguator of living geography, analogously to Villarreal de los Infantes — not a municipality. The 1274 town and this landscape are separate clocks.

The state name is a third clock. In 1579 Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, a Portuguese New Christian, obtained a capitulation for the Nuevo Reino de León, named for the Kingdom of León in Spain — Felipe II’s birthplace — not for the animal. León itself is Latin Legio. INAFED still writes that nomenclatura. The red lion on the 1943 state shield is folk-heraldry of the homonym.³⁸

Carvajal brought about a hundred families, many conversos from the León–Portugal border. The Inquisition later tried the household; Luis el Mozo wrote as Joseph Lumbroso. Local León pages title the episode “Un nuevo león”; Jewish-Mexican journalism restates a discreet Jewish colony. That is a sixteenth-century converso colonization, not a 1274 naming clause and not a modern Israeli state project.³⁹ Eugenio del Hoyo records a 1933 Mexican debate on whether the landing had been “un ensayo de colonización judía” anticipating the Mayflower — a later question, not the 1579 naming clause.

English “New Lion” is a machine calque. VisitMexico published it in August 2020 (Guerrero as Warrior, Torreón as Turret) and took it down.⁴⁰ Hebrew lion language — Lion of Judah, Ariel “lion of God,” Operation Rising Lion — is Israel’s own clock, from Numbers 23:24, not this toponym.⁴¹ Do not wind the calque, the 1579 kingdom, and the biblical lion as one clock.

A. Compilation of inscriptional examples

Epigraphy—the study of names in inscriptions—provides direct evidence of naming practices across eras and regions. The EAGLE Portal and related databases aggregate hundreds of thousands of inscriptions, enabling researchers to trace the appearance and evolution of names.

• Villarreal 1274: documentary evidence of the town’s foundation and demographic data.⁷
• Medieval Spanish manuscripts: royal donation charters, such as the thirteenth-century copy of a 1091 document from Burgos, containing names of kings, monasteries, and localities.¹⁰
• Cartularies: collections of charters and legal documents, often recording founders, benefactors, and witnesses.⁸

B. Methodology for epigraphic transcription and analysis

Epigraphic transcription involves careful reproduction of inscriptions, accounting for letter forms, abbreviations, and marginalia.⁹¹⁰ The EpiDoc Guidelines provide standards for encoding such texts in digital formats, facilitating analysis and comparison across corpora.⁹ Paleographic analysis aids in dating inscriptions and identifying regional script variations. Integrating epigraphic, paleographic, and onomastic methods yields a nuanced picture of historical naming practices.

A. Timelines and tables

Timelines and tables organize the evolution, variation, and migration of names. They make it possible to compare linguistic forms, historical events, and geographic movements.¹⁴

B. Epigraphic transcription and paleography

Epigraphic transcription requires attention to script, abbreviation, and context. Paleographic manuals guide recognition of letter forms, numerals, and marginalia in medieval manuscripts and inscriptions.¹⁰

C. Transliteration conventions

Transliteration bridges languages and scripts, enabling names to be represented in different alphabets. Conventions vary by language and period, as in the adaptation of Yisrael to Israel or Shlomo to Solomon.¹¹

D. Three stages of a name register

• Index the name records. Every occurrence is a token: spelling, date, place, role. Do not merge yet.²⁰²¹
• Build person dossiers. Decide which tokens are the same human. This is where most error lives.
• Ask one uniform questionnaire of every person: origin, office, kin, confession, land, and who they stand next to in a witness list. Then count.

E. The factoid model

Digital medieval projects such as PASE and People of Medieval Scotland store a factoid, not a biography: source S, dated D, asserts that person P did act A in place L.²²²³ One person can have fifty factoids. That keeps two Peter Peyronets from collapsing into one man because the names match.

F. Networks from charters

The main medieval edge type is co-witnessing: if A and B sign the same grant, they were in the same room that day, or the scribe wanted it to look that way.²³ Do not build the graph from an index of senders and recipients only. Charters hide people in the body — kin lists, officers, the almoner who takes the money. Read the grant.²⁴

A. What the method is for

Lawrence Stone defined prosopography as the investigation of the common background of a group of actors by a collective study of their lives.²⁰ Katharine Keats-Rohan’s tighter version: the analysis of connections between recorded people, and therefore of the institutions they sat inside.²¹ Names are the raw material. Identity is the hard problem. One life with a story is biography. Fifty fragmentary lives with the same fields filled in is prosopography.

Prosopography is about what the analysis of the sum of data about many individuals can tell us about the different types of connection between them.

K. S. B. Keats-Rohan

B. The identity problem

Same name is not the same person. Medieval Spain stacks given name plus byname (Paris the silversmith), given name plus place (de Burriana), given name plus office (almoner, commander of Xivert), and only later a habitational surname taken from a town that already existed. Record the form in the source first. Normalize later. Never start from a modern surname and hunt it backward into 1274.²¹

C. Iberian work already exists

Enric Guinot built a thirteenth-century Valencian society database.²⁵ Sesma, Laliena, and Navarro treated urban Aragon. HILAME compiles northern Spanish lives with the same factoid-plus-context pair.²⁶ The atlas on this site is a small, local application of that method to one town’s foundation cluster — not a claim to have reinvented it.

D. How to read the atlas

Open the Network atlas. Each node is a person or group named in, or securely adjacent to, the 1269–1274 acts. Each edge is a documented relation: grant, office, finance, recruitment, neighboring lordship. Click a name for the dossier. The ledger on the same page splits claims into in the record, adjacent, and not in the record. Keep the parts that survive. Do not glue them back together with vibe.

A name-study that only repeats the royal charter is too thin. A name-study that treats every silence as a hidden Templar-Jewish naming family is too thick. The working rule of this report is a three-column ledger.

• In the record: a dated factoid ties a named person or institution to Vila-real / Burriana.
• Adjacent: a real structure in the same landscape or a later surname history that must not be back-dated.
• Not in the record: a causal story (assassination bargain; a family named Villarreal as 1274 naming agent; Robot coined because someone was named Robert) that the acts used here do not support.

The interactive ledger in the atlas is the same table in clickable form. The dossier on this site takes each live claim — Templar namers, assassination bargain, 1429 departure, DNA-as-memory, two King James towns, rights to history and identity — at full strength, then cuts it. Family memory and DNA are data. They are a different kind of data from a 1274 grant. Onomastics lives in that tension; it does not pick a team.

DNA carries ancestry markers, not a stored memory of a town charter. Treat genetic genealogy as another distribution map of a later cohort — useful, not oracular.