Tea at Trianon: Galician Genes

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, April 16, 2026

Galician Genes

From EuroNews:

The official version reflected in the history books is that Columbus was born in Genoa, the seafarer of humble origins who convinced the Catholic Monarchs to finance what no one thought possible. This origin story has been questioned for decades by historians, linguists and, more recently, geneticists.

The latest chapter in this debate comes from a crypt in Gelves, a town in Seville where at least seven direct descendants of the explorer are buried. A team of researchers from the Citogen laboratory and the Complutense University of Madrid has published a preprint in 'bioRxiv' with the results of the third phase of a project that began with an exhumation in March 2022.

Its conclusions, not yet peer-reviewed, point to the Galician nobleman Pedro Álvarez de Sotomayor, known as Pedro Madruga, as the direct ancestor of the Columbian lineage.
It all started with a piece of information that did not add up. On analysing the DNA of 12 individuals exhumed from the family crypt of the Counts of Gelves, the researchers found that two of them shared genetic material without the historical documents justifying this relationship.

One was Jorge Alberto de Portugal, third Count of Gelves and great-great-grandson of Columbus. The other was María de Castro Girón de Portugal, a 17th century countess consort who had entered the family by marriage and whose lineage was Galician, she was the daughter of the 9th Count of Lemos.

That two people with no documented relationship share DNA can only be explained in one way: they have a common ancestor that the records do not show. The team applied a computational model on 16 generations of genealogies to identify that individual.

The analysis pointed, unequivocally according to the authors, to Pedro Álvarez de Sotomayor. To corroborate this, they resorted to the so-called Virtual Knock-out technique: when they virtually eliminated Pedro Madruga from the family tree, the genetic link between the two individuals disappeared. No other ancestor, among the hundreds analysed, was able to produce the same effect. (Read more.)