On Wednesday, January 4, 2023 at 4:03:54 AM UTC-8, Lord Bob wrote:
On Thursday, August 3, 2000 at 3:00:00 AM UTC-4, Leo van de Pas wrote:
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 <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
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
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.
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
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