Margarita de Castro y Sousa

[Leo van de Pas]

This subject has been discussed on gen-medieval more than year ago (I
think). What was established was that a Portuguese King had a "Moorish"
mistress. Sadly, for this story, Moors are not black. There is no black
branch of descendants of this Portuguese king and his mistress.
I wish that they removed that silly site on the Internet as it only
perpetuates this silly assumption. And in this latest revival they have
added more nonsense about a British King going to Africa and falling in love
and marry a Black Princess. Yuck!!
Best wishes
Leo van de Pas

----- Original Message -----
From: LibbyH5149 <libby...@aol.com>
To: <GEN-MED...@rootsweb.com>
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 10:24 AM
Subject: Margarita de Castro y Sousa

> Possibly the reference to an African Queen of a British monarch referred
to
> Duchess Charlotte Sophie of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of King George
III
> of Great Britain, (1738-1820). According to the Website of PBS’s
Frontline,
> which I visited some months ago, she was a direct descendant of Margarita
de
> Castro y Sousa, a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House. I have been
able
> to trace Margarita’s ancestry back to King Alfonso IV, O Osado, of
Portugal
> (1291-1357). Does anyone know how to connect her to Margarita from there?
Does
> anyone know where I could find more information on this African branch of
the
> House of Portugal?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Sincerely, Libby
>
>

[Francisco Antonio Doria]

8/4/00 2:24 AM LibbyH5149 remarked:

>she was a direct descendant of Margarita de
>Castro y Sousa, a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House.

Show me their blackness, then...

chico

[LibbyH5149]

Possibly the reference to an African Queen of a British monarch referred to
Duchess Charlotte Sophie of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of King George III
of Great Britain, (1738-1820). According to the Website of PBS’s Frontline,

which I visited some months ago, she was a direct descendant of Margarita de

[edom...@gmail.com]

Leo Van de Pas....well, don’t you sound like a bigot...”yuck” as you wrote. There is a Black bloodline within the Portuguese royal bloodline. I am Portuguese. It is well known and accepted. There is also direct genealogical evidence. Alfonso III had a mistress, Ouruana, who was a black Moor. There are the ancestors of Queen Charlotte of England and thus, ancestors of Queen Elizabeth and the British royal family. I suggest you educate yourself on history and the influence of the Black Moors in Portugal, Spain and many parts of Europe, rather than offer your bigoted viewpoints as “evidence” that royals can’t be of Black ancestry. We are all of Black ancestry...ever heard of the oldest bones of a human every found? They call her “Lucy”, a Black African woman.

[Ian Goddard]

On 28/11/17 11:32, edom...@gmail.com wrote:
> Leo Van de Pas....well, don’t you sound like a bigot...”yuck” as you wrote. There is a Black bloodline within the Portuguese royal bloodline. I am Portuguese. It is well known and accepted. There is also direct genealogical evidence. Alfonso III had a mistress, Ouruana, who was a black Moor. There are the ancestors of Queen Charlotte of England and thus, ancestors of Queen Elizabeth and the British royal family. I suggest you educate yourself on history and the influence of the Black Moors in Portugal, Spain and many parts of Europe, rather than offer your bigoted viewpoints as “evidence” that royals can’t be of Black ancestry. We are all of Black ancestry...ever heard of the oldest bones of a human every found? They call her “Lucy”, a Black African woman.
>

Perhaps it's you who needs to educate yourself on netiequette,
particularly the need to provide a proper reference to what you're
commenting on - who posted and when and quote at least part of what
you're replying to. You should also educate yourself on what Usenet and
newsgroups are because you're replying to such a group. This is the FAQ
for a sister group: http://www.genealogy-britain.org.uk/ which might be
helpful.

BTW, Leo passed away some time ago.

[taf]

On Tuesday, November 28, 2017 at 3:32:47 AM UTC-8, edom...@gmail.com wrote:
> Leo Van de Pas....well, don’t you sound like a bigot...”yuck” as you wrote.

One of the problems with responding to very old posts (did you notice this one was made 17 years ago) is that the context may not be evident. When Leo said "yuck" he was not even referring to the possibility of African ancestry, but to the complete disregard for scholarship and accuracy being applied in reporting this sensationalist media claim.

> There is a Black bloodline within the Portuguese royal bloodline.

There may well be, but the evidence that this is one is insufficient.

> I am Portuguese.

Irrelevant.

> It is well known and accepted.

It is broadly reported and often uncritically accepted, but the evidence is somewhat wanting.

> There is also direct genealogical evidence.

Not really.

> Alfonso III had a mistress, Ouruana, who was a black Moor.

Affonso had a mistress of obscure origin. As with several Castilian royal mistresses of obscure origin, it has been claimed she was Moorish, but others have claimed she was Jewish or Mozarab (i.e. Muslim, but ethnically Iberian). None of these are groups that one would typically call 'black' (one of Leo's points - if the term Moor is used precisely, it refers to Moroccan Berbers, which genetically are more akin to other Mediterranean populations than to sub-Saharan Africans (though as with most North Africans, they carry some sub-Saharan African admixture, but it would have been less in the 13th century). However, 'Moor' was also used to refer more generally to any non-Iberian Muslim in Iberia, and some of those were Arabian, with no more African admixture than their Jewish neighbors (and indeed many of the earliest Arabian Muslims were Jewish converts). So, she can't be demonstrated to have been Moorish, and even if Moorish, that doesn't make her 'black'. Why is this important?

> There are the ancestors of Queen Charlotte of England and thus, ancestors
> of Queen Elizabeth and the British royal family.

because this is the crux of the claim. Someone looked at a portrait of Charlotte and decided she had facial characteristics typical of sub-Saharan Africans. Not of Berbers, not of Arabs, not of Jews, but sub-Saharan Africans. So they looked at her pedigree to try to find anyone who could have been African and lit on this mistress of Affonso III, 15 generations back the pedigree.

And it is a ridiculous claim, not that an English queen could not have had an African ancestor, but because a single ancestor 15 generations back amidst a background that is otherwise of mixed European ethnicity is not going to make someone 'look black'. Even when someone who is 1/8 sub-Saharan African and 7/8 European they often show no 'African' features, while Charlotte would have been less than 1/32000 African even if Affonso's mistress was fully sub-Saharan, and equally important, her immediate family, her husband, and a broad swath of the royal families of her time shared this ancestry, and they didn't look the slightest bit 'African'. It is simply not the least bit credible that this extremely distant genealogical connection could have been responsible for her supposedly African features - that isn't how genetics works. If Charlotte had African features because of her genealogy, it must have been due to a crypto-paternity event surrounding her own birth, but it is more likely that the features being identified as African were due to a caprice of portrait painters, combined with selective vision of the sensationalists making the claim.

Back then to why it matters (above) what is meant by Moor - the vast majority of the peoples so described do not have the sub-Saharan facial features that these sensationalists claim to see in the portrait of Charlotte (but not in any of her close family members).

> I suggest you educate yourself on history and the influence of the Black
> Moors in Portugal, Spain and many parts of Europe, rather than offer your
> bigoted viewpoints as “evidence” that royals can’t be of Black ancestry.

First, he never said that royals can't be of Black African ancestry - he said yuck to this specific claim, and rightly so, as the specific claim in question represents bad genealogy, bad ethno-genetics, and bad journalism at the same time. Yuck indeed. He did not say European royals couldn't have been Black, he said that Moors (Moroccan Berbers) aren't black (in the sense of having the facial features of sub-Saharan Africans), and in this he is absolutely correct. Not everyone from the African continent has the stereotypical features that are being ridiculously claimed to have passed to Charlotte via this distant connection.

> We are all of Black ancestry...ever heard of the oldest bones of a human
> every found? They call her “Lucy”, a Black African woman.

Yes, humans arose in Africa, but to specifically mention Lucy as a Black African is both accurate (probably, we don't actually know for certain, though since the early human agriculturalists in Europe have genetic markers that show they had dark skin, and Lucy's close non-human relatives, chimps and bonobos, also have dark skin, it is likely she did too) and also extremely misleading, as the term 'black African' implies more than just being from the African continent and having dark skin - it implies a whole set of characteristics: genetic, ethnologic and cultural, that simply do not apply to Lucy.

taf

[beatrice....@gmail.com]

Le jeudi 3 août 2000 09:00:00 UTC+2, Leo van de Pas a écrit :
> This subject has been discussed on gen-medieval more than year ago (I
> think). What was established was that a Portuguese King had a "Moorish"
> mistress. Sadly, for this story, Moors are not black. There is no black
> branch of descendants of this Portuguese king and his mistress.
> I wish that they removed that silly site on the Internet as it only
> perpetuates this silly assumption. And in this latest revival they have
> added more nonsense about a British King going to Africa and falling in love
> and marry a Black Princess. Yuck!!
> Best wishes
> Leo van de Pas
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: LibbyH5149 <libby...@aol.com>
> To: <GEN-MED...@rootsweb.com>
> Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 10:24 AM
> Subject: Margarita de Castro y Sousa
>
>

Leo van de Pas complètement con et nul, bien qu'il aie peut être raison...Cheddar Man prouve sans doute que les trait négroïde de cette reine est sans doute directement de la lignée de Cheddar Man !

Taf : Je ne vois pas ce que les Arabes viennent faire dans ce débat ce ne sont que les 1er pilleurs, violeurs, voleurs que mes ancêtres ont fait confiance et les ont laissé s'installer sur le continent...Bref, si nous n'avons pas été spolier, voler, usurper? FALSIFIER... Nous n'aurons pas besoin à chaque fois d’essayer de rétablir, de trouver nos Ailleux ! On va donc heu pardon, vos scientifiques qui sont des chercheurs de vérités, vont continuer à trouver des Cheddar-Man partout... Et vous verrez qui sont sont les 1er et véritable peuple de cette planète !

[taf]

On Sunday, March 4, 2018 at 4:13:04 AM UTC-8, beatrice....@gmail.com wrote:

> Leo van de Pas complètement con et nul, bien qu'il aie peut être -

> raison...Cheddar Man prouve sans doute que les trait négroïde de
> cette reine est sans doute directement de la lignée de Cheddar Man !

This is so very wrong. Her perceived African traits were not due to descent from Cheddar Man, obvious from geography alone - any contribution from Cheddar Man would have been truly insignificant - the latest genetic findings show that the English hunter-gatherers, among whom was Cheddar man, were almost completely supplanted/replaced, and made very little genetic contribution to subsequent Brits, let alone Germans. Germany had their own stone-age hunter-gathereres, who would indeed have had darker skin (and blue eyes), but this would not have made Charlotte her 'look African'. The one most notable so-called 'Negroid trait' that Cheddar Man had, dark skin, is the one that Charlotte did not possess - it is her facial topography that is claimed to be 'African' and if you look at the Cheddar Man's skull, it is clear that with this regard the facial reconstruction of Cheddar Man was completely made up, as the determinative bone structures do not survive (and can't yet be extrapolated from genetics). If it violates the nature of genetics to suggest that these traits could have passed 15 generations without a trace and then suddenly popped up, what does it say about your proposal, that it would pass 450 generations and then pop up in one woman among the entire European population that would have shared such ancestry?

If Charlotte had African features, it was because an immediate ancestor, probably within three generations, was a sub-Saharan African, in which case one of her parents would have looked more 'African' than she did - that is how genetics really works for the features we are talking about. Neither parent did, so that only admits two solutions: 1) one of her 'parents' was not really her parent; or 2) that she didn't have African features, but some of her features were exaggerated/distorted to look that way by one or more artists who painted her (either through incompetence or as a political statement).

> Taf : Je ne vois pas ce que les Arabes viennent faire dans ce débat ce ne
> sont que les 1er pilleurs, violeurs, voleurs que mes ancêtres ont fait
> confiance et les ont laissé s'installer sur le continent...Bref, si nous
> n'avons pas été spolier, voler, usurper? FALSIFIER... Nous n'aurons pas
> besoin à chaque fois d’essayer de rétablir, de trouver nos Ailleux ! On
> va donc heu pardon, vos scientifiques qui sont des chercheurs de vérités,
> vont continuer à trouver des Cheddar-Man partout... Et vous verrez qui
> sont sont les 1er et véritable peuple de cette planète !

Unclear what you are trying to say here, but it doesn't appear to have anything to do with genealogy.

taf

[lady luck]

[Paulo Ricardo Canedo]

No offense, but your reply doesn't say anything. Please, repost with text.

[Lord Bob]

20 plus years later we can still see how ignorant someone is to say moors in africa were not black despite have a military of black moorish berber soilders. How stupid.

[taf]

I realize this was probably just a drive-by, but one should not assume that social conventions concerning racial categorizations are consistent across cultures, modern or medieval. Even within the same linguistic diaspora in modern times, what one thinks of as 'black' is different to your average South African, American, Brit or Australian. As such, calling someone else 'stupid' and 'ignorant' over their personal categorization of race is pointless, because the whole concept of clustering swaths of the planet's diversity into a handful of arbitrary groups based on geography, melanin and facial characteristics is itself highly dubious, even though culturally engrained.

What is important here is not what you or Leo consider(ed) to be 'black', but whether the Portuguese author who described the woman in question as a 'moor' equated that term with having the facial characteristics that the modern English journalist considered to be 'black' in a portrait of Queen Charlotte when concocting his absurd and ill-informed racial hypothesis. In medieval Portugal, the term 'moor' was itself ambiguous and variable, but it was often used as a religious designator rather than an ethnic one. To an Iberian Christian, 'moor' might refer to any Muslim, including not only the Moors of Morroco and their Berber allies, but also Arabs, Muwallids (Muslims of native Iberian deriviation) and convert slaves (whose origin could range from northern Iberia to sub-Saharan Africa to the Slavs of eastern Europe). It is a fool's errand to try to derive from the medieval Portuguese usage of 'moor' any ethnic characterization, but at least as far as it goes, Leo was accurate in expressing that the medieval Portuguese 'moor' was not synonymous with having the stereotyped 'black' facial characteristics claimed to be present in Queen Charlotte's portrait.

taf

[Rhue]

Leo was a racist. This thread is lame. White people are so obsessed with race and color. I suspect Leo was roughly 70 years old. In America, that is when white men usually can no longer hold in their true feelings and come out.

[pj.ev...@gmail.com]

On Friday, June 9, 2023 at 9:22:43 PM UTC-7, Rhue wrote:
> Leo was a racist. This thread is lame. White people are so obsessed with race and color. I suspect Leo was roughly 70 years old. In America, that is when white men usually can no longer hold in their true feelings and come out.

This is irrelevant. It certainly isn't genealogy.

[taf]

On Friday, June 9, 2023 at 9:22:43 PM UTC-7, Rhue wrote:

> Leo was a racist. This thread is lame. White people are so obsessed with race and color. I suspect Leo was roughly 70 years old. In America, that is when white men usually can no longer hold in their true feelings and come out.

Says the person who then immediately makes a blanket negative characterization of an entire race (the very definition of racism) and follows it with the bigots' trifecta of racism, sexism and agism.

The point Leo was making remains valid. The term 'moor' used to describe Afonso's mistress was not a racial characterization, it was a religious characterization. It did not equate with 'black'. That leaves us with no information regarding her race. Likewise, Leo was correct in dismissing a fiction he found online (unclear to what he was referring) regarding a British king going to Africa and marrying there.

Just the other day, I came across a YouTube video presenting a genealogical tree tracing Queen Elizabeth to a Muslim ancestor, a Black ancestor, and a Jewish ancestor, all Iberian. The first was hilariously wrong (tracing her from the childless Sancho, son of Alfonso VI - apparently an error for his (? half-)sister Sancha, but that would also be wrong, just not as absurdly). The second was based on this 'moor means from North Africa and everyone from anywhere in Africa is Black' doubly-flawed nonsense. The third (involving 'Paloma') is just generally untrustworthy, but potentially true in substance if not in its specifics, and is not the only claimed avenue for Jewish ancestry.

[lancast...@gmail.com]

With Iberian medieval genealogy being so difficult, I would be interested to know taf whether there are any reasonably strong and/or interesting cases for non-European ancestry among the shared Iberian ancestors of general European royalty.

[taf]

On Sunday, June 11, 2023 at 9:44:20 AM UTC-7, lancast...@gmail.com wrote:

> With Iberian medieval genealogy being so difficult, I would be interested to know taf whether there are any reasonably strong and/or interesting cases for non-European ancestry among the shared Iberian ancestors of general European royalty.

Not in the sense that I think you mean (see below), at least not that I am aware of. There is one documented case of adoption of a non-Iberian-derived king into the Spanish nobility, but I don't think he can be counted among the 'shared Iberian ancestors of general European royalty', his progeny being much more limited (though I could be wrong on this). The other claims I am aware of are fantastical for one reason or another, representing medieval legends or arising from credulous 17th/19th century pseudo-scholarship, or have been made up by modern scholars trying too hard, making suppositions based on their desire for such a descent to exist, using unsound onomastics, misreading the sources, and often all the above. There a few documented unions (marriages or liaisons producing children) but with descents that are invented (e.g. claims of descent from King Mauregato, who probably had non-European maternal ancestry but any lines from him are made up).

Back to your question, as asked, the following comes to mind: Jaime I of Aragon married Violant of Hungary, granddaughter of Agnes of Antioch, granddaughter of Alice of Jerusalem, granddaughter of the Armenian Gabriel of Meletene. Her daughters married kings of Castile and France, and from there this non-European ancestry spread throughout the royalty of Europe.

taf

[Peter Stewart]

As for Leo's attitude to black African ancestry, I know from private
correspondence that he was delighted to include in his database
descendants of the Russian poet Pushkin (whose mother was a grandaughter
of Peter the Great's general Abram Gannibal, born in Cameroon),
including the present duke of Westminster and marquess of Milford Haven
(a relative of King Charles) through a morganatic Romanov marriage, see
here:
https://www.genealogics.org/pedigree.php?personID=I00068783&tree=LEO,
here:
https://www.genealogics.org/descendtext.php?personID=I00068783&tree=LEO&display=block&generations=8
and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Petrovich_Gannibal.

Peter Stewart

--
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG antivirus software.
www.avg.com

[Johnny Brananas]

On Saturday, June 10, 2023 at 12:22:43 AM UTC-4, Rhue wrote:
> Leo was a racist. This thread is lame. White people are so obsessed with race and color. I suspect Leo was roughly 70 years old. In America, that is when white men usually can no longer hold in their true feelings and come out.

Also, Leo was not "in America," and was not an American (he was Dutch as well as "Aussie" after immigration).

[taf]

Along these lines, I just came across what appears to have resulted from someone's spell-checker run amok, but which will likely now give rise to another such claim of extra-European ancestry.

An online pedigree tracing the ancestry of the Barroso/de Basto showed Egas Gomez Barroso married to Urraca Vazquez de Ambia, daughter of Vasco Gadelha de Ambia, son of Guedo de ZAMBIA.

taf

[Peter Stewart]

Ah, but extra-European ancestry will not be denied by such an obvious
error for Guedo de GAMBIA.

[taf]

On Sunday, June 18, 2023 at 2:07:39 PM UTC-7, taf wrote:

> Along these lines, I just came across what appears to have resulted from someone's spell-checker run amok, but which will likely now give rise to another such claim of extra-European ancestry.
>
> An online pedigree tracing the ancestry of the Barroso/de Basto showed Egas Gomez Barroso married to Urraca Vazquez de Ambia, daughter of Vasco Gadelha de Ambia, son of Guedo de ZAMBIA.
>

Just as a genealogical aside, Guido is an unlikely basis for the patronymic Gadelha.

taf

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