On Friday, April 29, 2022 at 12:56:04 PM UTC-7, taf wrote:
I don't want to come across too critical. Overall it is a careful work, but just occasionally the author gets tripped up either by his own ingenuity or the respect he has for his esteemed predecessors.
More commentary: Where Salazar goes most afield is when he draws conclusions based on a simplistic view of onomastics. I have already commented on how he invented a wife for Ordono II through the insistence that a son Sancho must have been named for a
maternal grandfather rather than an immediate relative of the child's grandmother. Another example is found in his coverage of early Aragon where he says of Aznar Galindez I:
"Se desconoce su matrimonio, aunque por el nombre de su hijo menor, pudo contraerlo con una hija de Centulio, conde de Gascuña" (We don't know of his marriage, but from the name of his son, he may have wed a daughter of Centullo, count of Gascony)
If for the sake of argument we take it as given that names must have come from immediate family members, there is still multiple problems with this. The first is the supposition that the name Centullo must have been introduced into the family by Aznar's
marriage. What do we know about the names used in the family before this marriage? Aznar was son of Galindo. That's it. We know two names. Is it really a reasonable supposition that only these two names were in use by the family prior to this marriage?
In fact, for all we know, Aznar was grandson or nephew or brother of a Centullo, rather than marrying into the name. Even were the name to have come from the marriage, were the counts of Gascony really the only family in the region using this name, such
that every subsequent Centullo must come from them? There is inherent bias to such a conclusion - our novel name must have come from the absolutely most powerful person in the region, not because he was the only person with that name, but because he was
the only person with that name important enough to be preserved in the scant record. It is the same flawed reason there has been a long tradition of insisting every person named Raymond must descend from the Toulouse counts, and inventing marriages to
make that the case that have now joined the body of 'genealogical fact' even though it is anything but. And even if the name derived from the count of Gascony, must the connection be direct? Might not, for example, a niece of Centullo have wanted to
honor her prominent uncle?
So yes, Aznar's wife may have been a daughter of count Centullo but she also may have been daughter of literally any other noble family in the entire region at the time, and a single name, devoid of sufficient onomastic context either within the specific
family or for the overall region, is entirely insufficient to even suggest a specific parentage. But now that it is 'out there', it is only a matter of time before it appears in Wikipedia and propagates through the online genealogies as little short of
fact.
It is frustrating to see that while Salazar is stripping away the cumulative consequences of centuries of genealogists going off the rails, he is adding in his own (and the oft-cited Settipani's) no better-founded modern 'acceptable' version of
genealogical 'connect the dots'.
taf
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