For those of you who don't know. Bridgerton is a popular show on Netflix about romance in Regency England. Something infamous about the TV show is that multiple noblemen and noblewomen on the show are Black/Mixed-race despite the fact that wasn't acceptable in historical England. The TV show hand waves it by saying Queen Charlotte (a German princess) was actually a Black woman somehow and afterwards, Western European nobility became multiracial. It is silly, but that is romance fiction for you. My mother loves it for some reason.
It made me wonder, is there a plausible timeline where something like Bridgerton could actually happen? You have Black and White nobility engaging in royal European culture, getting in scandals, trading, warring, and intermarrying with each other? There are a few scant examples of Black European nobility like Abram Gannibal Petrovich and Belle, but those are very exceptional cases and they were never treated as equals by most of their contemporaries. What changes need to happen for something like Bridgerton to occur in real life? Can a Euro-African royalty even arise earlier like during medieval times?
The best POD I can think of is prevent Islam from forming or at least spreading. Before Islam, North Africa, Europe, and West Asia were a part of the same cultural and political sphere. The Arab Caliphates is what separated North Africa and the Middle East from the Christian and later on European spheres of influence. In a timeline without Islam, it would be commonplace for Christian Europeans to intermix and intermarry with Christian North Africans. If a major West African or East African kingdom or empire forms and christianizes, they would also join into the Mediterranean cultural/royal milieu. Of course, a timeline without Islam is a timeline that is very different from OTL (outside of Scandinavia and a few remote regions), so who knows what will happen. Alternatively, you could have Islam conquer Europe, but that seems like a more difficult and more disruptive POD; Arabs also had very different monarchical systems than Western Europeans.
It made me wonder, is there a plausible timeline where something like Bridgerton could actually happen? You have Black and White nobility engaging in royal European culture, getting in scandals, trading, warring, and intermarrying with each other? There are a few scant examples of Black European nobility like Abram Gannibal Petrovich and Belle, but those are very exceptional cases and they were never treated as equals by most of their contemporaries. What changes need to happen for something like Bridgerton to occur in real life? Can a Euro-African royalty even arise earlier like during medieval times?
The best POD I can think of is prevent Islam from forming or at least spreading. Before Islam, North Africa, Europe, and West Asia were a part of the same cultural and political sphere. The Arab Caliphates is what separated North Africa and the Middle East from the Christian and later on European spheres of influence. In a timeline without Islam, it would be commonplace for Christian Europeans to intermix and intermarry with Christian North Africans. If a major West African or East African kingdom or empire forms and christianizes, they would also join into the Mediterranean cultural/royal milieu. Of course, a timeline without Islam is a timeline that is very different from OTL (outside of Scandinavia and a few remote regions), so who knows what will happen. Alternatively, you could have Islam conquer Europe, but that seems like a more difficult and more disruptive POD; Arabs also had very different monarchical systems than Western Europeans.