29. Queen Charlotte’s Black Ancestry
The claim that Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744 – 1718) is black rests on her descent from a Madragana Ben Aloandro (born circa 1230). Madragana, described in the earliest available historic sources as having been Moorish or Mozarab, was a mistress of King Afonso III of Portugal. She bore him at least two children, one of whose distant descendants, fourteen generations later, included Queen Charlotte (see chart, below). In 1999, writer Mario d Valdez y Cocom popularized in a website developed for PBS Frontline the claim that Charlotte was black.
Valdez’s interest in the British queen’s African ancestry began with his belief that she “looked black” in her portraits. As he put it, Charlotte had a “negroid physiognomy” [sic] and an “unmistakable African appearance“. Others have had a hard time seeing that in Charlotte’s portraits, which do not stand out from portraits of other royal and aristocratic women of her era. Valdez eventually expanded his claims to include the assertion that Charlotte inherited her blackness from what he described as “a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House“. However, he furnished no evidence to support that assertion, and his theory of Queen Charlotte’s blackness is rejected by most scholars. As seen below, even if Madragana had been black, it would not make Charlotte black.