The surname is of toponymic origin, de Guzmán ("of Guzmán"), deriving from the village of Guzmán (es) in the region of Burgos. The earliest individual documented using this surname was Rodrigo Muñoz de Guzmán, who first appears in a document from 1134 and was the founder of the noble House of Guzmán.[1][a]
In the Philippines, Canada and the United States the name usually becomes Guzman (without acute accent), while the Portuguese form of the name is Gusmão.[citation needed]
^Earlier writers on the name had suggested it was of more ancient, Gothic origin. Alberto and Arturo García Carraffa in their Enciclopedia heráldica y genealógica hispano-americana (1919) believed the name to be Germanic from "good man", while Julio de Atienza, in Nobiliario español: Diccionario heráldico de apellidos españoles y de títulos nobiliarios (1949), suggested that the Guzmans came from Germany and settled in Burgos in 950, and the name is a corruption of Gudemaro, the Spanish form of the name of a gothic king.[2] An earlier form of this legend, dismissively related by Fernán Pérez de Guzmán in his 15th century Generaciones y Semblanzas, derived the family from Gudeman, brother of a Duke of Brittany who came to Iberia to participate in the Reconquest and there married the descendant of a Count Ramiro who was husband or lover of a daughter of a King of León, but which was entirely "undocumented, save for the memories of men".[3]
^Gonzalo Martínez Díez "Orígenes familiares de Santo Domingo, los linajes de Aza y Guzmán", in Luis Vicente Díez Martín and Cándido Aniz Iriarte, eds., Santo Domingo de Caleruega en sus contexto socio-político, 1170-1221. (Monumenta Histórica Iberoamericana de la Orden de Predicadores, 5) Jornadas de estudios medievales, Salamanca, 1994, p 173-228. Page 197 "No tenemos elementos para identificar con seguridad al Munio o Nuño, que fue el padre de nuestro don Rodrigo Muñoz o Núñez de Guzmán, primer caballero que usa el apelativo Guzmán."
^Donald Eugene Chipman, Nuño de Guzmán y la provincia de Pánuco en Nueva España, 2007, p. 79.
^(Anon.), Centón epistolario del Bachiller Fernán Gómez de Cibdareal, Generaciones y Semblanzas del Noble Caballero Fernan Perez de Guzman, Claros Varones de Castilla, y Letras de Fernando de Pulger, Madrid: Imprenta Real de Gazeta, 1775, pp. 227-8
Name list
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