Black Legend

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The anti-Spanish Black Legend (in Spanish, leyenda negra) is the depiction of Spain and Spaniards as bloodthirsty and cruel, greedy and fanatical. The term was coined by Julián Juderías in his 1914 book La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica (The Black Legend and Historical Truth). Underlying the Black Legend and its propagation is the intention to defame Spaniards and Hispanics generally.

The Black Legend is distinguished from other similar hoaxes created throughout history by its extension, influence and persistence in time. The legend influenced historical understanding and accounts in most European countries and, through them, much of the world. Its zenith came in the 16th century, but it effects can still be seen some 400 years later.

Other similar Roman Catholic nations, such as Portugal, have never been subjected to such treatment to the extent that the Spanish have been. The Inquisition was also active in Portugal, the Portuguese Jews were also expelled, slavery was more important in the Portuguese colonies than in the Spanish colonies, there were violent conquerors like Afonso de Alburquerque and brutal governors like Mem de Sá. Perhaps the long friendship between England and Portugal explains why these events and practices were not seen through the same lens as similar matters in Spain.

A White Legend (leyenda rosa in Spanish, literally, a "rosy" legend) is an historical account that depicts Spain and the Spanish people in a favorable light. As propaganda there is, however, no White Legend comparable to the Black Legend in either extension, influence or persistence. A White Legend is brought up by advocates of the Black Legend as a straw man to be easily knocked down by characterizing the facts underlying a favorable view of Spain or of Spaniards as false, incomplete or exaggerated.

Contents

Origin

From the 13th century, the Crown of Aragon (then a kingdom including Catalonia, with Barcelona as the kingdom's leading city) dominated Naples and Sicily, laying the grounds for a hatred of Catalans. The Valencian pope Alexander VI became an almost mythical villain, and countless legends and traditions attached to his name. Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere called Pope Alexander VI "Catalan, marrano and circumcised". According to Sverker Arnoldsson, the Italians' criticisms of the Spaniards were cultural and racial, not only economic and political: "age-long mixture of Spanish with Oriental and African elements, plus the Jewish and Islamic influence upon Spanish culture; this motivated the view of the Spaniards as a people of inferior race and doubtful orthodoxy."

The classic sources

The Spanish Inquisition was the most important topic of the Black Legend in the 16th century. Although the Inquisition had existed in many European countries before it existed in Spain, Ferdinand II of Aragon instituted the inquisition in Spain primarily to investigate and punish conversos, former Jews and Muslims who had converted to Roman Catholicism, but whose conversions were not entirely trusted. Some of the most famous support for the legend comes from two Protestants: the Englishman John Foxe, author of the Book of Martyrs (1554) and the Spaniard Reginaldo González de Montes, author of the Exposición de algunas mañas de la Santa Inquisición Española (Exposition of some vices of the Spanish Inquisition, 1567).

Another early source is Girolamo Benzoni's Historia nuovo (New History), first published in Venice in 1565.

No small part of the Black Legend comes from self-criticism in Spain itself. As early as 1511, some Spaniards criticized the legitimacy of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. In 1552, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas published his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies), a polemical and some consider exaggerated account of the excesses that accompanied colonization, in which he compares the natives with tame ewes and blames Spaniards for the murder of 30,000 to 50,000 Arawaks on the island of Hispaniola (now home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti).

Recent genetic research contradicts the theory of the total Spanish genocide in the Caribbean. Mitochondrial and Y-chromosome analysis have shown that 62% of Puerto Ricans come from an Amerindian ancestry and well over 70% have a white ancestry; see Demographics of Puerto Rico for further information. Indeed, the irony of the Brevissima Relación has been noted as follows: "The most powerful indictment of Spain's cruelty and avarice is at the same time a monument to its humanitarianism and sense of justice" [1].

The work of Las Casas was first referred to in English, with the publication in 1583 of The Spanish Colonie, or Brief Chronicle of the Actes and Gestes of the Spaniards in the West Indies, at a time when England and Spain were preparing for war in the Netherlands.

The Duke of Alva's actions in the United Provinces contributed to the Black Legend. Sent to a part of Europe where printing presses were a constant source of heterodox opinion to stamp out heresy and political unrest in August 1567, one of Alva's first acts was to gain control of the book industry. In a single year, several printers were banished and at least one was executed. Book sellers and printers were raided in the search for banned books, many more of which were added to the Index librorum prohibitorum. In 1576 Spanish troops attacked and pillaged Antwerp, over three terrible days that came to be known as "The Spanish Fury". 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. Plantin's printing establishment was threatented with destruction three times but was saved each time when a ransom was paid. Antwerp was economically devastated by the attack, and Plantin's business suffered. Such facts similar to German rampages in the sack of Rome (1527) were enlarged upon to enhance the Black Legend.

Other critics of Spain included Antonio Pérez, the fallen secretary of King Philip II of Spain. Pérez fled to England, where he published attacks upon the Spanish monarchy under the title Relaciones (1594).

These books were extensively used by the Dutch during their fight for independence from Spain, and taken up by the English to justify their piracy and wars against the Spanish. Foxe's book was among Sir Francis Drake's favourites; Drake himself was and is regarded by the Spaniards as a cruel and bloodthirsty pirate. The two northern nations were not only emerging as Spain's rivals for worldwide colonialism, but were also strongholds of Protestantism while Spain was the most powerful Roman Catholic country of the period.

The imprisonment of Don Carlos by his father, King Philip II of Spain, which was followed by the Prince's mysterious death, added to the legend, according to which the young heir had been murdered.

In the 18th century, Barcelona became also a source for these libels. It was the capital and most important city in the old Kingdom of Aragon. This kingdom, after the War of the Spanish Succession, had been unwillingly absorbed into the new House of Bourbon Spanish monarchy. The new monarch promoted in all his territories through a decree (Decretos de Nueva Planta) the laws, language and manners of Castille in return for its help during the aforementioned war, to the detriment of those of Aragon, who had supported the Habsburg candidate.

The Enlightenment

Guillaume Thomas François Raynal published in 1770 his most important work, L'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (The philosophical and political history of the establishments and commerce of Europeans in the two Indies, that is to say the East Indies and the West Indies).

Also during the Enlightenment, the imprisonment and death of Don Carlos, mentioned above, inspired the blank verse play Don Carlos, Infant v. Spanien (Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, 1787), by Friedrich Schiller, and later the opera Don Carlos by Giuseppe Verdi.

Romantic travellers

In the 19th Century, many writers, such as Washington Irving, Prosper Mérimée, George Sand, and Theophile Gautier, invented a mythical Andalusia. In their writings, Spain is converted into the Orient of the Western World (Africa begins in the Pyrenees), an exotic country full of brigands, economic delays, gypsies, ignorance, machismo, matadores, Moors, passion, political chaos, poverty and fanatical religiosity. From this literature, the figure of the Latin lover still survives.

In classical music, Georges Bizet with Carmen (1875) and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov with Capriccio espagnol (1887) contributed to this theme.

Westward Ho!

Charles Kingsley's popular historical romance of 1855, Westward Ho!, draws its inspiration from the black legend: the buccaneering hero sets out from Elizabethan England to defeat the Spanish at sea and on land; the Spanish characters are vain, arrogant and cruel; the Irish too are treated with hostility. Many articles in the early-20th century Dictionary of National Biography (heavily drawn upon by academic historians in Britain and America) cite Westward Ho! as a factual source when dealing with Elizabethan figures.

Modern historiography

Marcel Bataillon (1895-1977) revealed the extent of Erasmus's influence in Spain in Erasme et l'Espagne (1937). Erasmus was a humanist, and the popularity of his ideas in Spain goes against the stereotype of the country as being a monolith of fanatical Catholicism.

Black Legend in the United States of America

In his book Tree of Hate, Philip Wayne Powell wrote that the United States of America inherited the Black Legend from the British colonization of the Americas. These Anglo-Saxon prejudices toward Spaniards were transferred to Mexicans in the 19th century.

The American historian William S. Maltby says in his book The Black Legend in England (1982): "As many other Americans, I had absorbed the anti-Hispanism from movies and folkloric literature much before this prejudice was contrasted from a different point of view in the works of competent historians, what was a big surprise for me; When I succeeded to know the work of the Hispanists, my curiosity had no limits. The Hispanists have always blamed the enemies of Spain for the tergiversation of the Historic facts and the current worldwide prejudice against Spain."

Some people feel that the United States mass media and government have propagated the legend to justify United States actions against Spain or Latin American countries, as in the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War or the colonization of the Philippines after the Philippine-American War. They allege that there exists clear evidence of the Black Legend in modern literature, movies, and web sites, such as in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Steven Spielberg's Amistad. On the other side, the pirates of the Caribbean who used to attack defenseless Spanish merchant ships are turned into romantic and idealistic figures.

White Legend

In contrast to the Black Legend is a so-called White Legend (in Spanish, "leyenda rosa", literally "rosy legend"). Advocates of the Black Legend postulate the existence of a White Legend comparable to the Black Legend in extension, influence and persistence. An easily refuted straw-man White Legend is then invoked as a rhetorical device in discussions concerning the Black Legend. Few persons, however, believe in a so-called White Legend whereas tens of millions of people believe in the anti-Spanish, anti-Hispanic Black Legend. A "rosy" legend with reference to the history of Spain has been prominent only during certain limited time periods such as, for example, during the Falangist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

Proponents of the White Legend tend to excuse the Spanish Inquisition, emphasizing that in form it merely copied institutions already in place in the rest of Europe (the suppression of Catharism in France, Italy, etc.; the already existing Inquisitions in various parts of Italy), citing the unique situation of Spain as a country recently under Muslim Moorish domination, and comparing the Inquisition favorably with French Wars of Religion, Cromwell's suppressions of Royalists in Ireland or the witch hunts in many Protestant countries.

Similarly, these advocates tend to excuse the "The Spanish Fury" or the sack of Rome, emphasizing that troops of Habsburg Spain were composed by many different European nationalities and ethnicities but under fragile Spanish command. They criticize that Belgan, Italian or German rampages were enlarged upon and attributed solely to "Spanish" soldiers in order to enhance the anti-Hispanic Black Legend. In an opposite sense, Henry Kamen used this information to denigrate the Spanish contribution to the Spanish Empire. According to his book, the Spanish Empire was a multiethnic enterprise, with a testimonial role of the Spaniards and:

  • Armaments from Milan.
  • Genoese and German bankers, as the Fuggers.
  • Genoese (Andrea Doria), Portuguese (Magallanes, Quirós, Torres) and Venetian sailors.
  • German and Italian soldiers, e.g. Ambrosio Spinola.
  • English (in America and Triangular Trade) and Chinese (in the Philippines) merchants, and
  • Native American allies (as in the Conquest of Aztec and Inca Empire)

Kamen is controversial and truistic - no historical undertaking has ever been accomplished exclusively by any single nationality)

Although this addresses many matters, the White Legend is most notable in portraying Spain as uniquely benevolent during the conquest of the Americas.

For example, in dealing with Hernán Cortés's conquest of Mexico, the White Legend emphasizes that Cortés's army consisted largely of Native American enemies (and disgruntled vassals) of the Aztec Empire and credits the most exaggerated accounts of Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism.

There is evidence to suggest that at least some involved in the Spanish conquest of the Americas were more than routinely concerned for the welfare of the natives. There is no English or French equivalent of Bartolomé de las Casas, but this need not mean that the English and French were not engaging in comparable cruelties: it can reasonably be interpreted to mean simply that no one among them shared Bartolomé's eloquent dissent. Spain was relatively early in passing some laws for the protection of the natives of its American colonies, with the first such laws being passed in 1542; however, records suggest that the practice never matched the theory.

As for destruction of populations and cultures, the White Legend claims that the demographics of much of Latin America today favor Spain's claims to benevolence. Even today, the descendants of the Native Americans constitute the base of the population in many of the countries that comprised the Spanish Empire in America and Philippines. Some Amerindian languages have reached rank of co-official tongues in Latin American countries (Quechua and Aymará in both Peru and Bolivia and Guaraní in Paraguay). It is likely that Spanish priests actually spread Quechua beyond its original geographic area. This active spread of a native language by Europeans has no equivalent in the American countries which were originally colonized by other European powers, nor in Australia or New Zealand (although the Maori language in New Zealand is a comparable case of co-official status).

The White Legend regards the slave trade largely as an Arab and African matter, and plays down the Spanish role by emphasizing that of the English, Dutch, even the Portuguese, and other Europeans. The defenders of this point of view argue that Spain was prohibited by the Pope to take part in such activities, together with the fact it would be in breach of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world outside of Europe in an exclusive duopoly between the Spanish and the Portuguese, assigning Africa to Portugal.

Foot notes

  1. ^  Maltby, William S., The Black Legend in England (England 1971) p.15.

See also

Bibliography

  • Powell, Philip Wayne, Tree Of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations With The Hispanic World. Basic Books, New York, 1971, ISBN 0465087507.
  • Maltby, William S., The Black Legend in England. Duke University Press, Durham, 1971, ISBN 0822302500.

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.freepedia.org/Black_Legend.html"


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