Who gave California its nickname?

While some historical documents suggest that California was named after “Calida Fornax,” translating to the hot furnace and “cal y fornos,” meaning lime and furnace, some people say California is named after the Black queen: Queen Calafia.

So, how did we get here?

Some historians say that Spanish writer Garci Rodrigues de Montalvo wrote a popular novel known as Las Sergas de Esplandián, or The Adventures of Esplandián in 1500 based on the Island of California, as first reported in Face 2 Face Africa.

Montalvo described the Island of California:

“Know that on the right hand from the Indies exists an island called California very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise; and it was populated by black women, without any man existing there, because they lived in the way of the Amazons. They had beautiful and robust bodies, and were brave and very strong. Their island was the strongest of the World, with its steep cliffs and rocky shores. Their weapons were golden and so were the harnesses of the wild beasts that they were accustomed to taming so that they could be ridden, because there was no other metal in the island than gold.”

In the novel,  Queen Califia is said to have been a beautiful Black Moor and pagan who was on a mission to raise an army of women warriors and sail away from Cali to join a Muslim battle against Christians defending Constantinople.

The story goes on to reveal that Queen Califia was ultimately defeated. Still, the fictional character captured people’s hearts from all over the world, including Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés who would come to explore and name the state of California.

CALIFORNIA, USA — Anything donning the name “California” may very well owe its namesake to a 16th century Spanish romance novel and a fantastical island populated with women and gold. 

“It’s out of Spanish literature, no doubt about it, but it’s very complex the story of how the geographic name evolved,” said Bill Swagerty, a history professor at University of the Pacific.

Swagerty tied part of California’s name to the Spanish novel “Las Sergas de Esplandián” [the adventures of Esplandián], a Spanish romance story that reflects the crusades and the battles of the Moors against the Christians.

In the book, California was the island of a legendary queen named Califia who had an army of women, an island filled with gold, and pet griffins that ate men. 

However, California’s name didn’t just appear in the area after the book was written. It took years after Baja California was discovered by Cortés until the first reference of the California was put on a map.

The area’s first ever branding as California came in 1562, when a map of the area was made with California’s name right at the tip of Baja California. Swagerty said the cartographer, Deigo Gutiérrez, associated the area with the phrase "Calida Fornax" - which translates to "hot, fiery furnace."

California was believed to be an island separate from the mainland in the 1630's until Father Eusebio Kino discovered that California wasn't an island and could be reached by land from Mexico.

“It’s always been an allure, I think, for people who wanted to get to the west coast…,” said Swagerty.

But while that allure brought people in relatively modern eras, Swagerty said that allure wasn't always there for the earliest settlers.

Initially, during the Spanish era, the population was in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands. It wasn't an alluring place to be for Mexican colonists, who had gotten incentives to become citizens of California towns like Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. 

"They knew they would be so far from home [that] they wouldn't see relatives, perhaps ever again, and the supply route... was so iffy and so irregular that it was not a pleasant place to be for the average settler. That's just the truth of it," Swagerty said.

By 1848, that mentality changed when gold was found in California.

"It was the gold rush – the world rushed in overnight as J.S. Holiday put it…,” Swagerty said.

The Gold Rush was the largest mass migration that the country had ever seen, and it was the origin behind the populations of many California cities like Placerville, Roseville, Stockton, Galt, Nevada City, and Folsom.

According to Swagerty, about 300,000 people flooded into California within two years, which is roughly the entire population of Stockton.

“That’s where the population rush began but the second largest demographic push in California came in the 1950’s with the 'Move to California' on Highway 66,” said Swagerty.

The origin's of that migration can be traced back to the Great Depression and the mid-westerners who went to Southern California. Swagerty said this migration of led to people becoming factory workers around World War 2 and citizens during the baby boom.

California is the most populous state in the United States of America, and it is one of the most iconic: it is home to Hollywood, to the Golden Gate Bridge, to Alcatraz, and many other famous landmarks and institutions which have been immortalised and mythologised in film, literature, and the popular imagination.

But what is less well-known is that the place name ‘California’ is itself a literary creation: the name is derived from a work of literature.

The literary work in question is a long romantic novel composed in around the year 1500. Titled Las Sergas de Esplandián (i.e., ‘The Adventures of Esplandián’), this novel was the work of a Spanish writer named Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (c. 1450-1505).

Montalvo also worked on the modern version of an old fourteenth-century chivalric romance, Amadis of Gaul; when he had finished that, he decided to write a sequel, and Las Sergas de Esplandián was that sequel. This book would prove popular among Spanish-speaking readers for at least a century: Miguel de Cervantes even names it as among Don Quixote’s library of books in his comic picaresque novel of 1605.

In Las Sergas de Esplandián, Montalvo described a mythical island which he named California. This island was located west of the Indies:

Know that to the right hand of the Indies was an island called California, very near to the region of the Terrestrial Paradise, which was populated by black women, without there being any men among them, that almost like the Amazons was their style of living.

The Amazons, of course, were warrior women mentioned in classical Greek mythology. And, as we’ll see, strong women played an important part in Montalvo’s conception of the island of California. He goes on:

These were of vigorous bodies and strong and ardent hearts and of great strength; the island itself the strongest in steep rocks and great boulders that is found in the world; their arms were all of gold, and also the harnesses of the wild beasts on which, after having tamed them, they rode; that in all the island there was no other metal whatsoever. They dwelt in caves very well hewn; they had many ships in which they went out to other parts to make their forays, and the men they seized they took with them, giving them their deaths, as you will further hear.

Montalvo goes on to tell us that the isle of California contained ‘many griffons’ and that it was ruled by a beautiful queen whose name was Calafia.

But how did Montalvo come up with the name California? There are several theories here. The coinage was possibly influenced by the

Whatever its ultimate derivation and etymology, ‘California’ would be lifted from the pages of Montalvo’s book to become one of the most recognisable place names in the whole world. How did this happen?

When sixteenth-century Spanish explorers under the command of Hernán Cortés first encountered the Baja California Peninsula, they mistook the peninsula for an island, and were put in mind of the island of California described in Montalvo’s novel. It’s even rumoured that they were taken in by stories that this ‘island’ was inhabited by Amazonian women. So the peninsula was named ‘California’, even though it’s not an island and is (blessedly) free from griffons.

California was, in many respects, the birthplace of the modern digital world we all inhabit. Nowadays it’s known for Silicon Valley where numerous tech firms are based, but back in 1969 California was the place where ARPANET, the forerunner to the internet, was set up.

And although we all know the most famous California on the planet, in the United States, there are numerous other places in the world which have also been given that name: in England, for instance, California is the name of a hamlet in Bedfordshire, a village in Berkshire, a suburban area of the city of Birmingham, and a seaside resort in Norfolk, among other places.

All of these Californias, like the American one, owe their name to a now-forgotten Spanish novel written half a millennium ago.

Image: via Wikimedia Commons.