Black legend

For other uses, see Black legend (disambiguation).

Further information: Hispanophobia

A 1598 engraving by Theodor de Bry depicting a Spaniard feeding Indian children to his dogs. De Bry's works are characteristic of the anti-Spanish propaganda that originated as a result of the Eighty Years' War.

A "black legend" (Spanish: leyenda negra) is a historiographic phenomenon. It refers to the sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting, introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts about a certain nation, to create a distorted and uniquely inhuman and cruel image of it, while hiding from view all its positive contributions to history.

Historian Alfredo Alvar defined black legend as:

"The careful distortion of the history of a nation, perpetrated by its enemies, in order to better fight it. And a distortion as monstrous as possible, with the goal of achieving a specific aim: the moral disqualification of the nation, whose supremacy must be fought in every way possible."

— Alfredo Alvar, La Leyenda Negra (1997:5)

Black Legend

The term was originally coined by Emilia Pardo Bazán in a conference, Paris, April 18, 1899, and popularized by Julián Juderías, both making reference to the Spanish Black Legend (Spanish: La leyenda negra española, or simply La leyenda negra). Since then, Historians had embraced it, and the term "Black legend" has been given a broader use to describe a black legend affecting any nation, such as Rome, United Estates, or the Ottoman Empire. The term "The Black Legend", however, likely indicates "The Spanish Black Legend" specifically (Spanish: La leyenda negra), since it was the first one described.

According to historian Elvira Roca Barea the formation of a Black Legend is not an exclusively Spanish phenomenon, like Juderías thought, but one observed in all multicultural empires and powers that manage to maintain egemony for long periods of time. The black legend of empires would be the result of the following combined factors:

1. The combined propagandistic attacks and efforts of most smaller powers of the time, as well as defeated rivals.
2. The propaganda created by the many rival power factions within the Empire itself against each other as part of their struggle to win more power.
3. The self criticism of the intellectual elite, which tends to be larger in larger Empires.
4. The need of the new powers consolidated during the Empire´s life or after its dissolution to justify their new prevalence and the new order, by rejecting the past.

Said black legend tends to fade once the next grat power is stablished or that enough time has gone by.

The Spanish Black Legend

Julián Juderías was the first historian to describe and denounce this phenomenon in an organized way, providing the first definition of "a black legend" as well as the first description of "The (Spanish) Black Legend". His book The Black Legend and the Historical Truth (Spanish: La Leyenda Negra y la Verdad Histórica), a critique published in 1914, claims that this type of biased historiography has presented Spanish history in a deeply negative light, purposely ignoring positive achievements or advances.

The Spanish Black Legend is the hypothesis according to which Spain, the Spanish Empire, and Hispano America, their culture and their people, have been, or are, subjec of a black legend in western historiography. This hypothesis claims that political propaganda has been "absorbed and converted into broadly held stereotypes" that assumed that Spain was "uniquely evil." .

The black legend hypothesis does not deny the existence of documented atrocities, but they claim a comparative bias in the way in which the history and actions of different nations are portrayed. It is not an argument of total innocence but of unequal judgement.

Unique Aspects

However, the factors that would set the Spanish Black Legend apart from others, would be its abnormal permeation and outreach, its abnormal persistence through time way after the disolution of the empire, its recurrent use in later times, and its racialized component. The causes of this would be:

1. The overlap of the period of splendour of the Spanish Empire with the introduction of the printing press in England and Germany, that allowed the propaganda of such colonial and religious rivals to spread faster and wider than never before, and perdure in time way after the disappearance of said Empire. The printing press allowed protestant and anglican powers circulate fabrications or one sided propaganda aimed at presenting Spain as uniquely cruel, sadistic, greedy, retrograde and bigoted, in opposition to its tolerant an civilized northern rivals. This is agreed to be the main characteristic of the Spanish Black Legend.
2. The religious taint in it, which made it useful and necessary during later religious conflicts between protestantism and catholicism, for example in the United States, and helped keep it alive.
3. The substitution of the Spanish intellectual class by another favorable to former rival-France- after the War of the Spanish Succession, which established the French narrative in the country.
4. The unique characteristics of the colonial wars of the early contemporary period and the need of new colonial powers to legitimate claims in now independent Spanish colonies.
5. The unique characteristics of the next large empire, the British Colonial Empire, as a colonial Empire based mainly on trade control and soft power.

Definitions

In his book, Juderías defines The (Spanish) Black Legend as:

"The environment created by the fantastic stories about our homeland that have seen the light of publicity in all countries, the grotesque descriptions that have always been made of the character of Spaniards as individuals and collectively, the denial or at least the systematic ignorance of all that is favorable and beautiful in the various manifestations of culture and art, the accusations that in every era have been flung against Spain."

— Julián Juderías, La Leyenda Negra

Historian Philip Wayne Powell in Tree of Hate, gives this definition of the Black Legend:

"An image of Spain circulated through late sixteenth-century Europe, borne by means of political and religious propaganda that blackened the characters of Spaniards and their ruler to such an extent that Spain became the symbol of all forces of repression, brutality, religious and political intolerance, and intellectual and artistic backwardness for the next four centuries. Spaniards … have termed this process and the image that resulted from it as ‘The Black Legend,’ la leyenda negra."

— Philip Wayne Powell, Tree of Hate (1985),

Later writers have supported and developed Juderías's critique. In 1958, Charles Gibson wrote that Spain and the Spanish Empire were historically presented as "cruel, bigoted, exploitative and self-righteous in excess of reality".. The hypothesis of a Spanish Black legend existing as a way of anti-Hispanic propaganda in the 16th and 17th centuries has a high level of acceptance among specialists, but the extent of its reach, the data it affected, and wheter it is still in efect today is the subject of heated debate. .

Origins

Anti-Spanish sentiment appeared in many parts of Europe as the power of the Spanish empire grew. With the Habsburg realm, Spain dominated much of Europe including present-day Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and parts of Italy and Germany. In 1555 Pope Paul IV described Spaniards as "heretics, schismatics, accursed of God, the Offspring of Jews and Marranos, the very scum of the earth". During the Eighty Years' War English and Dutch propaganda depicted Spaniards as bloodthirsty barbarians. In the following centuries anti-Spanish stereotypes circulated widely, especially in English, Dutch and German-speaking parts of Europe. This propaganda would depict exaggerated versions of the evils of Spanish colonial practices and the Spanish Inquisition. Various reasonable origins have been sugested for the Spanish Black legend.

Italian Origin

Sverker Arnoldsson, from the University of Gothenburg, supports Juderías hypothesis of the existence of a Spanish Black Legend in European historiography, locates the origins of the Black Legend in medieval Italy, unlike previous authors who locate it in the 16th century. In his book The Black Legend. A Study of its Origins, Arnoldsson cites studies by Benedetto Croce and Arturo Farinelli to affirm that Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries was extremely hostile to Spain, and considers that the texts produced and distributed there were later used as a base to build on by protestant nations.

Arnoldsson's theory on the origins of The Black legend has been disputed as confusing the process of Black Legend generation with simply a negative view or a critique of a foreign power. In general, they raise the following objections:

1. Just because the earliest writings against Spaniards were written in Italy, that is not sufficient reason to describe Italy as the origin of the Black Legend. It is a normal reaction in any society dominated by a foreign power.
2. The phrase "black legend" suggests a certain "tradition", which did not exist in Italian writings based primarily on a reaction to the recent presence of Spanish troops, that faded quickly.
3. In 15th adn 16th century Italy there coexisted critics as well as Italian intelectuals that greatly admired Spain, specially Ferdinand of Aragon.

William S. Maltby further argues that the Italian satyre lacks the "conducting theme", the common topic and narrative that would later form of the black legend in the Netherlands and England.. Roca Barea also protests this idea andm, even though she does not denny that Italian writings may have been used by German rivals, the Italian writings "lack the viciousness and blind deformation of black legend writings", and are just satyric reactions to an ocupation. In general, the Italian origin hypothesis is a good field to explore and read about the difference between a black legend and a simply negative view.

German Renaiscence Origin and Anti-mediterranean View

Arnoldsson offered a second alternative to the Italian Origin in its polar opposite, the German Renaiscence. German humanism was deeply nationalistic and longed to create a german identity in opposition to the Roman invaders". However, for both Ulrich of Hutten and Martin Luther, the main authors of the movement, combine the "Roman" in a wider concept of the "Latino, or "Welsche". This Lating world includes Spain, portugal, France and Italy, and is perceived as "foreign, immoral, chaotic and fake, in opposition to the moral, ordered and german".

In addition to the idnetification of Spanish with Jews, heretics and "Africans" -see "anti-Semitic Origin- there was a clear increase in anti Spanish propaganda among the detractors of Emperor Charles V. The propaganda against Charles V was deeply nationalistic and identified him with Spain and Rome- Even though he was Flemish born and raised, from a German dinasty, and spoke little Spanish and no Italian at the time, and had issues with the Pope- and though with "Welsche" and chaos. ​ To further the appeal of their cause, anti-Charles princes focused on identifying Charles with the Pope, a view that Charles himself had started as a way to force the Spanish troops to accept involvement in his personal German wars, which they very much resisted as not-their-business. The fact that the troops and supporters of Charles included german and protestant princes and soldiers was an extra reason to focalize atention on the rejection of the foreign elements, the Spanish, attached to them. It was necesary to create fear to the Spanish rule, and to do so a certain image must be created. At this point, the printing press would come into full action. Among the points most often highlighted was the identification of Spanish with "moors and jews", due to the high level of intermarriage and "conversos"(converted jews or muslims) in their society, and with the "natural cruelty of those two".

Some authors consider that various incidents with the troops of Charles V in Germany during the war contributed to build The Spanish Blakc legend, while others consider that, the fact that the troops were majoritarely composed by Germans-with Spaniards and Italians- but the cruel actions were atributed exclusively to Spaniards proves that The Black legend had already been built, or deep in the process, prior to this events.

By the end of the 16th century The Black Legend had acquired clear race-based elements under the influence of Flemish and French writers. By this time the power of Spain ahd also grown enought to threaten France´s sense of safety, and the Flemish nobles had given up all hope of extending their influence in the Castilian and Aragonese courts as they had initially tried to do -see The Revolt of the Comuneros. This created fear in France and discontent in the Flemish nobility, who saw their comparative power diminished and had been repeatedly denied its desire to participate in the American conquest by the courts of Castile. See following point.

The Black Legend and the Anti-Semitic Origin

This Origin combines elements of the german origin with the proofs of the anti-Hispanic narrative existing prior to the 16th century, and with the large number of paralelisms between anti-Spanish and anti-Semitic narratives in modern Europe, and it is among the ones that are gathering most support.

Roca Barea, among others, argues that The Black Legend is founded on a spin-off, a reused version of the anti-Semitic narratives forged and circulated through England and most of Central Europe from the 13th century on.

According to this view the Spanish Black Legend was created by transfering the already created "character" of the "cruel, gold lusty Jew" onto the Spanish nations. Since the narrative was familiar, the stereoype accepted, and the identification of Spaniards and jews was already mainstream in Europe due to the long history of coexistence between both in Iberia, at a time in which the Jews had been expulsed from most of Europe, the Black legend was proptly believed and asimilated in central Europe.

This case has three main sources of proof, the texts of German Renaiscence Intellectuals, the existence of black legend narrative in Europe prior to the conquest of America, and the similarity of the stereotypes associated to judaism by anti-semitic Europe and those that the black legend attributed to the Spaniards.

Texts identifying Spaniards with "heretics" and "jews" can be found in Germany from the 14th century, and various pieces of 15th and 16th century anti-Spanish propaganda are almost line by line copies of prior anti-semitic works. For example the famous account of the mistreated native Americans killing their oppressors by pouring melted gold on their heads is an exact copy of the same scene in the anti-semitic poem The Siege of Jerusalem. It also suggests that the deep anti-semitism in Luther´s works may have served a double function, nationalistic and anti Spanish as wella s religious, if that identification between both was already in circulation.

Luther creates a particularly explicit correlation between "the Jew", already detested in Germany at the time, and "the Spanish", which had a growing power in the area. He describes both as "thieves, false, proud and lusty". It is hard to believe that the words of such an influentian thinker would go unnoticed. This animosity of Luther towards Spain, even though it sitll was not the power it would later become, is explained by Arnoldsson as follows:30​

-An identification of Italy and Spain with the papacy, even though the Papacy and Spain were bitter enemies at the time. -His own antisemitism and the long history coexistence-and intermarriage-of Christians and Jews in Iberia -the Spanish royal line was known to have jewish blood in it. Luther characterized Spanairds as «sunt plerunque Marani, Mamalucken»; Jews, sons of jews". -Identification of Spain and Turkey, and fear to an invassion by both.

Ideo prophetatum est Hispanos velle subigere Germaniam aut per se aut per alios, scilicet Turcam [...] Et ita Germania vexabitur et viribus ac bonis suis exhausta Hispanico regno subiugabitur. Eo tendit Sathan, quod Germaniam liberam perturbare tentat.

Luther​

In 1566 Luther´s conversations are published. Among many other similar afirmations, he is quoted as writing: [...] Spaniern [...], die essen gern weiss Brot vnd küssen gern weisse Meidlein, vnd sind sie stiffelbraun vnd Pechschwartz wie König Balthasar mit seinem Affen.

The Spanish eat white bread and kiss blonde women with all pleasure, but they are as brown and black as King Balthasar and his monkey" .

Other Origins

England

England is sometimes pointed at in relation to The Spanish Black Legend. England had a crucial role in its spread and use during colonial times, but it is also agreed that, no matter how much they added to it, the origin of the narrative was not here and actually reached the islands quite late in the game.

Sephardic Jews

This element has been highlighted by American Hispanist Philip Wayne Powell. He stated that the criticisms spread by the jews expelled by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain have been considered an important part in the spread of anti Hispanic sentiment, especially when it comes to religious stereotypes. Interestingly enough, those accounts tend to characterize Spain as godless, heathen and idolactric, as opposed to fanatically catholic like other German sources, but as usual those two things were not seen as mutually exclusive. Even though the jew community had already been expelled by almost all parts of Europe, including some of those who re-admitted them as a result of their feud with Spain, the level of criticism that the Sephardic jews displayed was not seen regarding any other nation. Some of the explanations offered for this are that the jew community had never enjoyed such a golden period as they did in Spain, nor been so integrated, which made the expulsion more traumatic; that in other cases they were not so integrated in academic life; or that similar criticisms may have existed regarding other nations but found no amplifying mechanism in other parts of Europe and faded away, while the Sephardic jews got enthusiastic listeners in Holland and the Netherlands.

The active involvement of expelled Sephardic Jews, particularly of former intellectuals, in spreading a distorted image of Spanish religious practices has been supported by the studies of Yosef Kaplan, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi andJaime Contreras.

Development

The conquest of the Americas

Main article: Spanish colonization of the Americas

In the process of European colonization of the Americas that lasted over three centuries, atrocities were committed by all nations, according to both contemporary opinion and modern moral standards. It is historically established fact that Spain's colonization involved murder, slavery (including sexual slavery) and genocide of Native peoples, and that these atrocities began during the Columbian voyages in the Caribbean. However, Spain did pass some laws for the protection of Native Americans. As early as 1512, the Laws of Burgos regulated the behavior of Europeans in the New World forbidding the ill-treatment of indigenous people and limiting the power of encomenderos—those who received royal grants of authority to impose forced labor on specific groups of natives. In 1542 the New Laws expanded and corrected the previous body of laws in order to improve their application. Although these laws were not always followed across all American territories — resulting in documented cruelty by slave owners and little ground for redress by the natives — they at least reflect the will of the Spanish colonial government of the time to protect the rights of the native population.

Testimonies of the time accuse Columbus of brutality against the natives and forced labor, and direct reports by members of his journey tell of murder, rape and enslavement in the words of the perpetrators. These atrocities led to debate within Spain itself about the treatment and rights of indigenous peoples in the Americas. In 1552, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas published the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies), an account of atrocities committed by landowners and some officials during the early period of colonization of New Spain, particularly in Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Las Casas, son of the merchant Pedro de las Casas who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, described Columbus's treatment of the natives in his History of the Indies. Their description of Spanish savagery was used by writers of Spain's rivals as a convenient basis for attacks on Spain which would later be referred to as The Black Legend. They were already used in Flemish anti-Spanish propaganda during the Eighty Years' War. Today the degree to which Las Casas's descriptions of Spanish colonization represent a reasonable or wildly exaggerated picture is still debated among some scholars. For example, historian Lewis Hanke considers Las Casas to have exaggerated the atrocities in his accounts and thereby contributed to Black Legend propaganda. Historian Benjamin Keen on the other hand found them likely to be more or less accurate. In Charles Gibson's 1964 monograph The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, the first comprehensive study of the documentary sources of relations between Indians and Spaniards in New Spain (colonial Mexico), he concludes that the Black Legend "builds upon the record of deliberate sadism. It flourishes in an atmosphere of indignation which removes the issue from the category of objective understanding. It is insufficient in its understanding of institutions of colonial history."

This historical ill-treatment of Amerindians, also occurring in other European colonies in the Americas, was used as propaganda in works of competing European powers to create animosity against the Spanish Empire. The work of Las Casas was first cited in English with the 1583 publication The Spanish Colonie, or Brief Chronicle of the Actes and Gestes of the Spaniards in the West Indies, at a time when England was preparing for war against Spain in the Netherlands. The biased use of such works, including the distortion or exaggeration of their contents, is part of the anti-Spanish historical propaganda or Black Legend.

From the perspective of history and the colonization of the Americas, all European powers that colonized the Americas, such as England, Portugal, the Netherlands and others, were guilty of the ill-treatment of indigenous peoples. Colonial powers have been also accused of genocide in Canada, the United States, and Australia. These issues have received greater scholarly attention over recent years and have led to and evolution in historiographical evaluations of the effects of colonialism. "At least three generations of scholarship have produced a more balanced appreciation of Spanish conduct in both the Old World and the New, while the dismal records of other imperial powers have received a more objective appraisal."

The Netherlands

Spain's war with the United Provinces and in particular the victories and atrocities of the Duke of Alba contributed to the anti-Spanish propaganda. Sent in August 1567 to counter political unrest in a part of Europe where printing presses were a source of heterodox opinion, especially against the Roman Catholic Church, Alba took control of the book industry. Several printers were banished and at least one was executed. Book sellers and printers were prosecuted and arrested for publishing banned books, many of which were added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

After years of unrest in the Low Countries, the summer of 1567 saw renewed violent outbursts of iconoclasm, in which Dutch 'Beeldenstorm' Calvinists defaced statues and decorations of Catholic monasteries and churches. The Battle of Oosterweel in March 1567 was the first Spanish military response to the many riots, and a prelude to or the start of the Eighty Years' War. The 80 Years' War can be seen to have started on 13 March 1567 with the defeat of the rebels at Oosterweel. In 1568 Alba had prominent Dutch nobles executed on the Grote Markt in Brussels, sparking strong anti-Spanish sentiment. In October 1572, after the Orange forces captured the city of Mechelen, its lieutenant attempted to surrender when he was informed that a larger Spanish army was approaching. They tried to welcome the Duke's forces by the singing of psalms, but Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo, son of the Governor of the Netherlands, and commander of the Duke's troops, allowed his men three days of pillage of the archbishopric city. Alba reported to his king that "not a nail was left in the wall". A year later, magistrates still attempted to retrieve precious church belongings that Spanish soldiers had sold in other cities. This sack of Mechelen was the first of the Spanish Furies; several events remembered by that name occurred in the four or five years to come. In November and December of the same year, with permission by the Duke, Fadrique had many people of Zutphen and of Naarden locked and burnt in their church.

The "Spanish Fury" of 4 November 1576 in Antwerp. Anonymous painting, last quarter of 16th C.

In July 1573, after half a year of siege, the city of Haarlem surrendered. Then the garrison's men (except for the German soldiers) were drowned or had their throats cut by the duke's troops, and eminent citizens were executed. In 1576, Spanish troops attacked and pillaged Antwerp. The soldiers rampaged through the city, killing and looting; they demanded money from citizens and burned the homes of those who refused to (or could not) pay. Christophe Plantin's printing establishment was threatened with destruction three times, but was saved each time when a ransom was paid. Antwerp was economically devastated by the attack. A thousand buildings were torched and as many as 18,000 men, women and children murdered. Maastricht was besieged, sacked and destroyed twice in succession (in 1576 and 1579) by the Spanish. The siege of 1579 ended with the destruction and sacking of the city known as the 'Spanish Fury'. During the assault they killed not only many of the town's defenders but also many women and children. The Spanish soldiers deliberately drowned hundreds of civilians by throwing them off the bridge leading over the river Maas, an episode which bore similarities to the earlier events in Zutphen.

The propaganda created by the Dutch Revolt during the struggle against the Spanish Crown can also be seen as part of the Black Legend. The depredations against the Indians that De las Casas had described, were compared to the depredations of Alba and his successors in the Netherlands. The Brevissima relacion was reprinted no less than 33 times between 1578 and 1648 in the Netherlands (more than in all other European countries combined).

The Articles and Resolutions of the Spanish Inquisition to Invade and Impede the Netherlands imputed a conspiracy to the Holy Office to starve the Dutch population and exterminate its leading nobles, "as the Spanish had done in the Indies." Marnix of Sint-Aldegonde, a prominent propagandist for the cause of the rebels, regularly used references to alleged intentions on the part of Spain to "colonize" the Netherlands, for instance in his 1578 address to the German Diet.

Portugal

King Philip, at the time also king of Portugal, was accused of cruelty for his hanging of supporters of António, Prior of Crato, the rival contender for the throne of Portugal, on yardarms on the Azores islands, following the Battle of Ponta Delgada.

Reception in England

Other critics of Spain included Antonio Pérez, the fallen secretary of King Philip, who fled to France and England, where he published attacks on the Spanish monarchy under the title Relaciones (1594). The English referred to these books to justify privateering and wars against the Spanish.

Others

In the 18th century, despite the fact that he never visited Spain, philosopher Immanuel Kant stated that "The Spaniard's bad side is that he does not learn from foreigners; that he does not travel in order to get acquainted with other nations; that he is centuries behind in the sciences. He resists any reform; he is proud of not having to work; he is of a romantic quality of spirit, as the bullfight shows; he is cruel, as the former auto-da-fé shows; and he displays in his taste an origin that is partly non-European." Historian Walter Mignolo has argued that the Black Legend was closely tied to ideologies of race, both in the way that it used the Moorish history of Spain to depict Spaniards as racially tainted, and in the way that the treatment of Africans and Native Americans during Spanish colonial projects came to symbolize their moral character.

Reception

In general, the idea of the existence of the Spanish Black Legend is accepted by academics, even though the consensus is not absolute. There is wild debate regarding how deep it goes, what facts are true or fabricated, and if it is still active or not.

Arguments Against

Ricardo Garcia Carcel directly denies the existence of the Black Legend in his book The Black Legend (1991), arguing:

"It is neither a legend, insofar as the negative opinions of Spain have genuine historical foundations, nor is it black, as the tone was never consistent nor uniform. Gray abounds, but the color of these opinions was always viewed in contrast [to what] we have called the white legend."

Arguments in Favour of

Among the Hispanists, Historians and specialists in colonial history that subscribe to the idea of a Spanish Black Legend having permeated or permeating still European historiograpy.

Philip Wayne Powell declares that the double standard is obvious and offensive:

"Spaniards who came to the new world seeking opportunities beyond the prospects of their European enviroment are contemptuously called cruel and greedy goldseekers, or other oprobious epithets virtually synonymous with Devils; but Englishmen who sought New World opportunities are more respectfully called colonists, or homebuilders, or seekers after liberty. (...) When Spanish prosecuted religious disidents that was called bigotry and fanaticism ...When Dutchmen and Englishmen did the same thing, that was called unifying the nation." — Philip Wayne Powell, Tree of Hate (1985), pp 11.

Edward Peters, estates this in his work "Inquisition":

" The inquisition was regarded outside of Spain as a necesary cleansing, since all Spaniards were accused of having Moorish and Jewish ancestry. (...) First condemned by the impurity of their beliefs, the Spanish then came under fire for excess of zeal in defending catholicism. Influenced by the political and religious policies of Spain, a common type of etnic inventive become an eloquent form of description by character assasination. So, when Bartolomé de las Casas wrote his criticism of certain governmental policies in the New World, his limmited, persuasive, especific purpose was ignored."

-Edward Peters, Inquisition

William S.Maltby,

"As part of an Elizabethan campaign against Spain and the Catholic Church ...Literary hundreds of anti-Spanish publications appeared in English, Dutch, French, and German in the sisteenth century. New editions and New works restating old acusations would appear in the Thirty Years War and in other ocasons when it seemed useful to excite anti Spanish sentiment. Given the pervasiveness of such material it is not surprising that the authors of scholarly histories absorved anti-hispanism and transmitted it to later generations" -  William S.Maltby, The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire.

 Richard Kagan, Margaret R. Greer, Helen Rawlings, Ronnie Hsia, Lu Ann Homza, Stanley G. Payne, Andrea Donofrio, Irene Silverblatt, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Charles Gibson (historian), María Elvira Roca Barea, Ronald Hilton, Joseph Pérez, Bartolomé Bennasar and Sverker Arnoldsson, who specialized himself in the study of the subject. 

In other fields, such as musicology and sociology, proponents of this theory are Judith Etzion and William Styron .

The Black Legend Today

The perdurance, or not, of the Black Legend is a debated issue. In recent years a group of historians including Alfredo Alvar and Lourdes Mateo Bretos have argued that the Black Legend does not currently exist, the Black Legend instead being merely the Spanish perception of how the world views Spain's legacy.

Carmen Iglesias has argued that the black legend would consist in those negative traits, that would be objectively the most repeated ones, that the Spanish consciousness sees in itself. Nonetheless she admits that the black legend also responds to highly manipulated propaganda driven by political interests.

Henry Kamen considers that the black legend existed during the XVI century but is a thing of the past in England, other authors consider that it continues afecting Spanish adn Latin America diplomatic and economic present and world status.

Other authors, however, like Roca Barea, Philip Wayne Powell, and consider that it still afects the way in which Spain is perceived and that it is brought up strategically during diplomatic conflicts of interest, as well as in popular cultue to hide the negative actions of other nations. Among those who consider that The Black Legend is still around, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Benjamin Keen, Patricia Shaw, David J. Weber, and Eric Griffin, have devoted work especifically to study the cause of such an uncanny persistence.

Those who consider that The Black legend still affects Spain and the Latin American world point out events like:

• The use in English of the word " conquistador" instead of "conqueror" (lthe literal translation of conquistador), as well as of "conquista" instead of "conquest" (also, the literal translation of conquista) in order to create a new, unique category of connotation that separates both Spaniards from other Europeans,a nd the actions of the Spanish in the new world from the conquerors in Europe, even though both actions were not seen as different, nor were carried out differently at the time.
• Direct references to constructs from the times of the black legend were made in British and Canadian press during the "Fletan War" of 1992 between both countries. This conflict was "solved" by diplomatic pressures partially generated by those black legend elements and never made it to international court.

• Powell considered it the root of current diplomatic problems and anti-latino sentiment in the United States, and he shows so in his work The Tree of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting Relations with the Hispanic World (1971). The view of the black legend afecting modern day USA´s immigration policy has gained suporters in the current political climate. . The narrative of the "degenerated race" is argued to be at the root of the racist discrimination sufered by Latinos in America.

• Spanish foreign minister Josep Borrell explained that he sees a re-emergence of the black legend across Europe in the way the Catalonian conflict has been covered, especially by English speaking press, regarding the unquestioning acceptance of unchecked numbers of injured that turned out to be false.

• Popular culture and Cinema: Spanish proponents of the prevalence of the black legend point out that the black legend view Spain and Spanish history, as well as to its anti-catholic elements are common in popular culture, such as in movies like Elizabeth, popular culture references to similar deeds by other colonial powers are scarce or idealized in movies such as Victoria & Abdul . . In his essay Why Spaniards Make Good Bad Guys? Samuel Amago analizes the persistence of the black legend in contemporary european cinema through a long list of titles, actors and directos.

• The Black legend Narrative, as well as the "British White Legend" narrative are still believed to be fact by most Americans, which is the population group with most comunicative outreach.

• The black legend is, allegedly, a main contributor to the construct of white supremacism since it ereases both the ethical and intelectual contributions of Southern Europeans and reduce the power and competence achived by Native American Empires prior and during the Spanish conquest.

White Legend

The label "White Legend" is used by some historians to describe a historiographic approach that they consider to go too far in trying to counter the Black Legend, and which consequently ends up painting an uncritical or idealized image of Spanish colonial practices. Such an approach has been described as characteristic of Nationalist Spanish historiography during the regime of Francisco Franco, which associated itself with the imperial past couched in positive terms. Some, such as Benjamin Keen, have criticized the works of John Fiske and Lewis Hanke as going too far towards idealizing Spanish history. White legend may also refer to the propaganda spread within spain by ``Phillip II++ and his descendants, to present his actions to preserve his own patrimony in the Netherlands and America as religiously motivated. This propaganda would create the view of a prudent and pious monarch within Spain, helping to control the unrest that his agressive policies and wars in the Netherlands were generating.

See also

• New Laws
• Anti-Catholicism
• Atrocity propaganda
• Black armband view of history, a similar concept in Australia
• Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition
• Blood libel
• Colonial mentality
• Cultural depictions of Philip II of Spain
• Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas
• Encomienda
• Historical revisionism
• Historiography of Colonial Spanish America
• History of the west coast of North America
• Information warfare
• Laws of Burgos
• New Laws
• Spanish colonization of the Americas
• Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire
• Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire
• Spanish conquest of Yucatán
• Spanish Empire
• Valladolid debate

Further reading

• Ardolino, Frank. Apocalypse and Armada in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (Kirksville, Missouri: Sixteenth Century Studies, 1995).
• Arnoldsson, Sverker. "La Leyenda Negra: Estudios Sobre Sus Orígines," Göteborgs Universitets Årsskrift, 66:3, 1960
• Díaz, María Elena (2004). "Beyond Tannenbaum". Law and History Review. 22 (2): 371–376. doi:10.2307/4141650.
• Edelmayer, Friedrich (2011). "The "Leyenda Negra" and the Circulation of Anti-Catholic and Anti-Spanish Prejudices". European History Online.
• Español Bouché, Luis, "Leyendas Negras: Vida y Obra de Julian Juderías", Junta de Castilla y Leon, 2007.
• Gibson, Charles. The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New. 1971.
• Gledhill, John (1996). "Review: From "Others" to Actors: New Perspectives on Popular Political Cultures and National State Formation in Latin America". American Anthropologist. New Series. 98 (3): 630–633. doi:10.1525/aa.1996.98.3.02a00210.
• Griffin, Eric. "Ethos to Ethnos: Hispanizing 'the Spaniard' in the Old World and the New," The New Centennial Review, 2:1, 2002.
• Hadfield, Andrew. "Late Elizabethan Protestantism, Colonialism and the Fear of the Apocalypse," Reformation, 3, 1998.
• Hanke Lewis. The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. 1949.
• Hanke, Lewis. Bartolomé de Las Casas: Bookman, Scholar and Propagandist. 1952.
• Hauben, Paul J. (1977). "White Legend against Black: Nationalism and Enlightenment in a Spanish Context". The Americas. 34 (1): 1–19. doi:10.2307/980809.
• Hillgarth, J. N. (1985). "Spanish Historiography and Iberian Reality". History and Theory. 24 (1): 23–43. doi:10.2307/2504941.
• Kamen, Henry, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763. New York: HarperCollins. 2003. ISBN 0-06-093264-3
• Keen, Benjamin, "The Black Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities", Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no. 4 (November 1969): 703–19.
• Keen, Benjamin, "The White Legend Revisited: A Reply to Professor Hanke's 'Modest Proposal,'" Hispanic American Historical Review 51, no. 2 (May 1971): 336–55.
• LaRosa, Michael (1992–1993). "Religion in a Changing Latin America: A Review". Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs. 34 (4): 245–255. doi:10.2307/165811.
• Lock, Julian. "'How Many Tercios Has the Pope?' The Spanish War and the Sublimation of Elizabethan Anti-Popery," History, 81, 1996.
• Maltby, William S., The Black Legend in England. Duke University Press, Durham, 1971, ISBN 0-8223-0250-0.
• Maura, Juan Francisco. "La hispanofobia a través de algunos textos de la conquista de América: de la propaganda política a la frivolidad académica". Bulletin of Spanish Studies 83. 2 (2006): 213-240.
• Maura, Juan Francisco. "Cobardía, crueldad y oportunismo español: algunas consideraciones sobre la 'verdadera' historia de la conquista de la Nueva España". Lemir (Revista de literatura medieval y del Renacimiento) 7 (2003): 1-29. [1]
• Mignolo, W. D. (2007). "What does the Black Legend Have to do with Race?" Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, 312-24.
• Powell, Philip Wayne, Tree of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations with the Hispanic World. Basic Books, New York, 1971, ISBN 0-465-08750-7.
• Rabasa, José (1993). "Aesthetics of Colonial Violence: The Massacre of Acoma in Gaspar de Villagrá's "Historia de la Nueva México"". College Literature. 20 (3): 96–114.
• Sanchez, M.G., Anti-Spanish Sentiment in English Literary and Political Writing, 1553-1603 (Phd Diss; University of Leeds, 2004)
• Schmidt, Benjamin, Innocence Abroad. The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670, Cambridge U.P. 2001, ISBN 978-0-521-02455-6
• Vigil, Ralph H. (1994). "Review: Inequality and Ideology in Borderlands Historiography". Latin American Research Review. 29 (1): 155–171.