She had maybe a North African ancestor born 524 years before her birth. To put it very simple, no she was not biracial unless we use a definition of it making everybody biracial.
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Was Queen Charlotte mixed race?
- Thread starter Irrisa
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She had maybe a North African ancestor born 524 years before her birth. To put it very simple, no she was not biracial unless we use a definition of it making everybody biracial.
Yep, the idea that Romans and Greeks were as white as modern people sitting indoors all day is a modern invention.
On topic: IIRC she did have some ancestor from Africa, but four centuries removed. Making any sort of race claims based on that is just.. funny. (Without even mentioning the "you are likely descended from Charlemagne/Genghis Khan" argument, because at some point - 10 generations back IIRC - the tree just collapses)
It could very well be that she has 0 North African ancestry, the genome is not shuffled into infinitely tiny pieces, instead certain areas of the genome are swapped with far higher likelihood and this means that generally in the long term you tend to have far fewer genetic ancestors compared to genealogical ancestors and this tends to make one-off outside ancestry disappear for most people:
This makes talking about such distant genealogical ancestry even less sense.
Probably one of the ancestors of everyone with any French or German Ancestry too. It is quite possible that the common ancestor of all Europe was alive when Edward III was born since it is expected that he/she was born 29 or 30 generations ago.
Yeah, Mohammed is probably among the ancestors of everyone that has Eurasian or North African ancestry today. He lived quite close to the last common generation to which all of us could trace our ancestry to everyone alive.
Yeah more or less. I highly doubt she herself knew anything about it with how far back it was.
It's likely, but we can't know - he had many children, but after so long, and not there being any records on what happened to most of them, reliably tracing a descent line from him is impossible. the Dulo clan of the Bulgars apparently claimed to be descended from him through his son Ernak, but as i said, there's no way to verify it.
Yea this reads way too much like "she had one ancestor who was black thus she is black".
The moors could be Iberians or North Africans, but as you pointed out they probably would look not that different from Christians of those regions. People in the Mediterranean region had been travelling around it for centuries. Its not surprising that when you look at Spaniards and Moroccans that they look similar to one another.
This is also disregarding that IIRC the usage of moor was often just shorthand for Muslim, though could be wrong here.
The historian Brett Deveroux has an entire collections section dismantling this notion, in particular this post. As mentioned above, even if one was to assume that the Moorish ancestor was from Africa, that doesn't mean that they look like people from sub Saharan Africa, and even then that is a big generalization. Africa is a huge land with lots of different peoples and a huge variety of skin tones throughout the continent.
It's pure tabloid material on a level only British rags could produce, both the specific claim and the general idea. The specific claim usually has something to do with Zaida, mistress of Alfonso VI, their son Sancho, and something involving the prophet Mohammad. It's all nonsense. Contemporary Medieval sources aren't in accord regarding Zaida's background; the most reliable only assigns her a husband, not a parentage, so we can't even say for certain which ethnic group she came from.
More importantly, Zaida's only certainly-documented child was the aforementioned Sancho, who famously died without issue (or else Alfonso VI would not have left daughters as heirs, given he was preparing Sancho to succeed him). So we cannot say for certain that Zaida left any living descendants. She might have been the mother of some of Alfonso's other illegitimate children, but so far as I'm aware no others are assigned to her in contemporary accounts.
Now, even if this purported pedigree was correct (though as we've shown it wasn't), Queen Charlotte would hardly have been mixed race; she would have had one extremely distant ancestor (perhaps through a few different lines) that might have had a different ethnicity compared to most of the rest. This is incredibly common and not noteworthy. No one alive today sports an entirely 'pure' ancestry, and no one in the past did either. Race and ethnicity meant very different things in the past, including 11th century Spain, and those terms are not directly comparable to the ones we use today.
The concept of race is more about phenotype than genetics anyway (there is more genetic diversity within Africa than outside of it, unsurprisingly), and Queen Charlotte was plainly white as can be, was treated by society as white, and benefitted greatly from a system that exploited the Transatlantic Slave Trade for all it was worth. If that's not white privilgedge, I don't know what is.
Now, as for her actual ancestry; she's a Mecklenburg, which means she descends (distantly, in the male line) from a group of North German Slavic pagans via Niklot. She would also have descended from some Medieval Scandinavian royalty through Euphemia of Sweden, and of course your usual hodge-podge of high German nobility that her more immediate ancestors would have married into. In any case, there would have been nothing special about her ancestry that was specific to her; she descended from the same people virtually any other German royal would have descended from. Certainly nothing which would qualify her to be mixed race in any meaningful way.
More importantly, Zaida's only certainly-documented child was the aforementioned Sancho, who famously died without issue (or else Alfonso VI would not have left daughters as heirs, given he was preparing Sancho to succeed him). So we cannot say for certain that Zaida left any living descendants. She might have been the mother of some of Alfonso's other illegitimate children, but so far as I'm aware no others are assigned to her in contemporary accounts.
Now, even if this purported pedigree was correct (though as we've shown it wasn't), Queen Charlotte would hardly have been mixed race; she would have had one extremely distant ancestor (perhaps through a few different lines) that might have had a different ethnicity compared to most of the rest. This is incredibly common and not noteworthy. No one alive today sports an entirely 'pure' ancestry, and no one in the past did either. Race and ethnicity meant very different things in the past, including 11th century Spain, and those terms are not directly comparable to the ones we use today.
The concept of race is more about phenotype than genetics anyway (there is more genetic diversity within Africa than outside of it, unsurprisingly), and Queen Charlotte was plainly white as can be, was treated by society as white, and benefitted greatly from a system that exploited the Transatlantic Slave Trade for all it was worth. If that's not white privilgedge, I don't know what is.
Now, as for her actual ancestry; she's a Mecklenburg, which means she descends (distantly, in the male line) from a group of North German Slavic pagans via Niklot. She would also have descended from some Medieval Scandinavian royalty through Euphemia of Sweden, and of course your usual hodge-podge of high German nobility that her more immediate ancestors would have married into. In any case, there would have been nothing special about her ancestry that was specific to her; she descended from the same people virtually any other German royal would have descended from. Certainly nothing which would qualify her to be mixed race in any meaningful way.
Sacer Bubonicus
Banned
Given that peasants were frequently described as "brown", "bronzed", etc, due to the obvious consequences of being out in the sun all day, and you can still find plenty of such people in rural France with nary a Moorish ancestor in the last 20 generations, I think this is just one giant case of selective interpretation by modern people who've seen a much broader range of skin colors than medieval Europeans saw, and hence think differently of what "brown skin" means. It also helps if you have a political agenda you're trying to push... real Hotep-tier history, if you know what I mean.
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Wasn't her mother Argentinean? Not that it matters, but that would be more of a cultural difference. The woman was European.
Also interesting historically black both skin and hair was often described as blue in Northern Europe. We know color perception is affected by culture and language and Germanic people at least have had a tendency to mix blue/black and yellow/white in their language.
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We can't know certainly. It is impossible to trace any lineages to 5th century. In Europe at best we can get to Charles Martel (grandfather of Charlemagne) and some generations backward to Arnulf of Metz. There is some claims that he would be descendant of Merovingians but there is not reliable sources and records on that time are pretty poor.
Charlotte or Philippa of Hainaut might have had Moorish ancestry but it's far more likely that any descent would've come from Arab or Berber stock instead of Sub-Saharan African ones (the only dynasty that had major SSA interbreeding were the Almoravids for obvious reasons). Even so, it would've been so diluted (far more than Meghan's ancestry) that deeming them as mixed race or even black is a huge stretch only worthy for crazy conspiracy theorists and ignorant Afrocentrists.
This is coming from the same people that think Beethoven or Mozart were black.
In the case of Phillipa of Hainault it would require both that there was no racism so noone saw her race as worthy of particular comment and yet at the same time require that there was racism so that she was whitewashed in the painting of her at her coronation.
In all fairness I would argue Medieval Europe was a lot less racist than Europe during Queen Charlottes time due to the whole superiority complex from conquering half the world not being in play and the whole concept of race based on skin colour would make absolutely no sense in that time period. Something that makes this claim even dumber.
Crazy Boris
Banned
Everyone is mixed race, no matter how you define “race”. It’s statistcally impossible that anyone is solely 100% anything thanks to our old friend the family tree paradox, and it’s been that way probably since the Stone Age when people first started diverging into different groups. So no, she’s not the first British Royal with African heritage, that would be some Pre-Roman Celtic chieftain lost to time who was the first royal in Britain full stop who maybe had some greatx40 grandfather who was Nubian or something.
So yes, and so is pretty much everyone on earth, maybe with the exception of the Sentinelese, but that’s just because they’ve kept themselves isolated for the last 400 centuries, give or take a few weeks.
And chances are, she wouldn’t have even known, given how far back that ancestor is, making that information just as useless in her time as it is now. I like genealogy and it’s neat to look back in the ancestry of famous people, but “continent of origin” isn’t a particularly interesting fact, given there’s only six possibilities (fewer if you like to lump continent’s together), and every one of those continents is hella diverse, making that fact useless for much of anything.
Basically, this whole thing is just tabloid fartery. Who cares, Charlotte and this ancestor of hers are a million times more interesting as people than what they might have looked like according to some categories that don’t even make sense to anyone with even twenty seconds worth of anthropology knowledge. Is just that this idea of race and skin color has been pushed into people’s minds so much by media and politicians that the normies think it means anything and treat it like it’s not only a real thing, but a big special important thing. Just uneducated people being uneducated because they’re told to by people who use that ignorance for attention.
If you really want to know a person’s ancestry, it makes more sense to think in terms of ethnicity rather than “race”. “Black” or “White” are meaningless, that doesn’t tell me anything, it barely even helps with visualizing appearance since that encompasses a veritable hardware store paint sample section of skin tones. If someone says “that guy’s black” it’s like what do you mean, that could be like two thousand different distinct peoples everywhere from New Guinea to Abkhazia to Liberia to Argentina, but if you’re specific and say “that guy’s Igbo” then we’re getting somewhere, that actually means something.
Sidenote: what’s the deal with people assuming “Moors” are a homogenous group? Have you ever seen the Maghreb? Any human skin color that exists, you can find there, it’s a total melting pot, there’s dozens of ethnic groups, tribes, and clans under that umbrella term.
So yes, and so is pretty much everyone on earth, maybe with the exception of the Sentinelese, but that’s just because they’ve kept themselves isolated for the last 400 centuries, give or take a few weeks.
And chances are, she wouldn’t have even known, given how far back that ancestor is, making that information just as useless in her time as it is now. I like genealogy and it’s neat to look back in the ancestry of famous people, but “continent of origin” isn’t a particularly interesting fact, given there’s only six possibilities (fewer if you like to lump continent’s together), and every one of those continents is hella diverse, making that fact useless for much of anything.
Basically, this whole thing is just tabloid fartery. Who cares, Charlotte and this ancestor of hers are a million times more interesting as people than what they might have looked like according to some categories that don’t even make sense to anyone with even twenty seconds worth of anthropology knowledge. Is just that this idea of race and skin color has been pushed into people’s minds so much by media and politicians that the normies think it means anything and treat it like it’s not only a real thing, but a big special important thing. Just uneducated people being uneducated because they’re told to by people who use that ignorance for attention.
If you really want to know a person’s ancestry, it makes more sense to think in terms of ethnicity rather than “race”. “Black” or “White” are meaningless, that doesn’t tell me anything, it barely even helps with visualizing appearance since that encompasses a veritable hardware store paint sample section of skin tones. If someone says “that guy’s black” it’s like what do you mean, that could be like two thousand different distinct peoples everywhere from New Guinea to Abkhazia to Liberia to Argentina, but if you’re specific and say “that guy’s Igbo” then we’re getting somewhere, that actually means something.
Sidenote: what’s the deal with people assuming “Moors” are a homogenous group? Have you ever seen the Maghreb? Any human skin color that exists, you can find there, it’s a total melting pot, there’s dozens of ethnic groups, tribes, and clans under that umbrella term.
And the Spanish Moors upperclass were so mixed with the local Iberians that the last Caliph Hisam II was only 0.9% genetically Arab.