My mother said she called me Martin because the name was uncommon (this being back in the day when William , Stephen and David were the sort of names people got rather than Brooklyn ) there were 5 of us called Martin in my year and I went to a small school . But there you go there are fewer of us now. I found a note at one point that Hernan Cortes was given 20 slaves by the natives of Tabasca (I wonder if that where the name for Tabasca Island comes from ) anyway one of the slaves was a women called La Malinche who became his mistress they had a son and guess what he was called - yup Martin !!

Mind you strikes me as an unlikely name for a Spanish conquistador and a 16th century south American women to choose but there we are .

I looked it up intrigued by my own question and find it is derived from the latin name for Mars and is quite common in Spain particularly as a surname where its pronounced Marteen .