Black Legend
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The Black Legend (Spanish: La Leyenda Negra) is the depiction of Spain and Spaniards as bloodthirsty and cruel, intolerant, 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). The Black Legend is evident in works by early Protestant historians describing the period of dominant Spanish imperialism; many also see its influences, including the historical revision of the Inquisition, in the villains and storylines of modern fiction and film.
The nature of Spain and its policies at home and abroad has also been a cause of contention amongst Spaniards themselves, from Gongora's Soledades until the Generation of '98. Traditionally, the Black Legend has been used by nationalists of non-Castilian regions as a political weapon against the central government or Spanish nationalism, which the conservative parties have countered with the White Legend, a term referring to attempts to describe Spain's history as gentler, more virtuous, and generally better than that of other European countries. It is associated with Nationalistic politics and with the regime of dictator Francisco Franco. To avoid causing offense, the Seville Expo '92 celebrated the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America as the beginning of the Age of Discovery, and not of colonization or conquest.
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[edit] Definition
The creator of the term, Julián Juderías, described it in 1914 in his book La Leyenda Negra[1] 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 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.[2] | ” |
The second classic work on the topic is Historia de la Leyenda Negra hispanoamericana (History of the Hispanoamerican Black Legend),[3] by Rómulo D. Carbia. While Juderías dealt more with the beginnings of the legend in Europe, the Argentine Carbia concentrated on America. Thus, Carbia gave a broader definition of the concept:
| “ | The legend finds its most usual expression, that is, its typical form, in judgments about cruelty, superstition, and political tyranny. They have preferred to see cruelty in the proceedings that were undertaken to implant the Faith in America or defend it in Flanders; superstition, in the supposed opposition by Spain to all spiritual progress and any intellectual activity; and tyranny, in the restrictions that drowned the free lives of Spaniards born in the New World and to whom it seemed that they were enslaved indefinitely.[3][4] | ” |
After Juderías and Carbia, many other authors have defined and employed the concept.
Philip Wayne Powell, in his book Tree of Hate, also defines 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”[5] | ” |
One recent author, Fernández Álvarez, has defined a Black Legend more broadly as "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.[6]
[edit] Elements of the Legend
[edit] Expulsion of the Jews and Muslims
The expulsion of the Jews and Muslims in 1492 has often been quoted as an example of the Spaniards' religious intolerance.
[edit] The Spanish Inquisition and religious intolerance, Catholic Spain
- See also: Inquisition and Spanish Inquisition.
The Inquisition has always been one of the main parts of the Black Legend. Its incorporation into the legend dates from the 16th century, when it was first criticised by, amongst others, two Protestant authors: the Englishman John Foxe, a polemicist who published the Book of Martyrs in 1554, and the Spaniard Reginaldo González de Montes, author of Exposición de algunas mañas de la Santa Inquisición Española (Exposition of some methods of the Spanish Inquisition) (1567).
The legend depicts the Spanish Inquisition as cruel and bloodthirsty. The image of moats, chains, cries and rooms of torture is inseparably attached to it. Thousands of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and anyone who had fallen from favour would then have been cruelly tortured and finally murdered in the dungeons of a Catholic institution by Dominican friars.
[edit] European colonization of the Americas
In general, the European colonization of the Americas was a disaster for the indigenous peoples of the Americas and for the Africans trafficked in the Atlantic slave trade. The Spanish, as early colonizers, were involved in all aspects of the conquest and slave trade. Propagandists for their British and Dutch rivals emphasized the differences between approaches the northern countries' preference for settler colonialism and the more military Spanish colonialism, although there is little reason to believe that either was any better for the natives or plantation slaves. In this, they were aided somewhat by being able to cite Spaniards' own critiques of colonial policies, particularly the works of the School of Salamanca and the dramatic, probably exaggerated (for polemical effectiveness), first-hand account of Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas.
[edit] Origin
From the 13th century, the Crown of Aragon dominated Naples and Sicily, laying the foundations for a widespread resentment of Aragonese dominance. The reputation of the Aragonese pope, Alexander VI Borgia, assumed an almost mythical villainy. Countless legends and traditions attached to his name, and Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere dismissed him as, "Catalan, marrano and circumcised".
According to Sverker Arnoldsson, Italian criticisms of the Spanish derived not only from economic and political concerns, but also from prejudices over culture. Sverker Arnoldson also states that with the insults by the Italian pope, Paul IV, the Italians demonstrated an inferiority complex in the face of a victorious, conquering and powerful neighbor nation.
In his book, Tree of Hate, Philip Wayne Powell describes how the Black Legend developed in different European countries, such as Germany, France, Holland and England. This development is put down to the reaction against Spanish supremacy in Europe and the New World, which was influenced by the emergence of Protestantism - and even by the rise of Nordicism - in an effort to counter the power of the Spanish-dominated southern part of the continent.
[edit] Sources
[edit] 16th century
Exaggerated and lurid accounts of the Roman Catholic Inquisition in Spain were, in the 16th century (a time of great Protestant-Catholic strife) and still today, principal sources for the anti-Spanish Black Legend. The Inquisition had existed in many European countries before it came to Spain. It had existed in the Kingdom of Aragon for some two centuries but not in Castile until the year 1480 when the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, approved its establishment throughout Spain with the converso and Dominican friar, Tomás de Torquemada, as its first Inquisitor General, primarily to investigate and punish Judaizing conversos, Jews who had converted to Roman Catholicism but had continued practising their religion in secret.
Some of the strongest and earliest support for the Legend came 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 from which the Black Legend drew support was Girolamo Benzoni's Historia nuovo (New History), first published in Venice in 1565.
Even today, major support for the Black Legend comes from the use of published self-criticism generated from within Spain itself. As early as 1511, some Spaniards criticized the legitimacy of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Then, in 1552, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas published his famous Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies), a polemical account of the abuses that accompanied of the colonization of New Spain, and especially the island of Hispaniola (now home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti). In the section regarding Hispaniola, Las Casas compares the indigenous Arawaks to tame ewes and writes that when he arrived in 1508, "there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it." [1]The work of Las Casas was first referenced 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 and Spain were preparing for war in the Netherlands. Many scholars agree that Las Casas's population figures are exaggerated.
The Duke of Alba's actions in the United Provinces contributed to the Black Legend. Sent in August 1567 to stamp out heresy and political unrest in a part of Europe where printing presses were a constant source of heterodox opinion, one of Alba'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.
[edit] 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 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.
[edit] 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 underdevelopment, Gypsies, ignorance, machismo, matadores, Moors, passion, political chaos, poverty and fanatical religiosity. In classical music, Georges Bizet with Carmen (1875) and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov with Capriccio espagnol (1887) contributed to this theme.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene has a strong Black Legend component in Book Five. Arthur and Artegall's joint victory over the cruel Souldan and his forces in Canto VIII can be seen as an allegorical recreation of the English defeat of the Spaniards at the time of the Spanish Armada.
[edit] The Spanish Civil War
While the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939 aroused among the international Left and Right storng waves of support and admirarion for the corresponding side in Spain, there was a considerable part of international public opinion who disapproved of both sides in the civil war. For them, the widespread atrocity stories emanating from Spain (and often exaggerated as part of both sides' war propaganda) were taken as a new proof of the supposed inherent brutality of all Spaniards, whatever their politics. This was reinforces by the statements of Spaniards who chose to sit out the war in exile, expressing disgust with both sides.
After 1945, Spain got a considerable negative reputation as "The last holdout of Fascism in Europe" - though the survival of Franco's regime had mainly to do with his staying out of WWII, rahter than to any innate Spanish cultural trait.
[edit] Bullfighting
Until the 19th Century, blood sports such as bear baiting, dog fighting and cock fighting were common in many countries, and Spain was not particularly conspicuous in this respect at the time when the "Black Legend" originated. But since Victorian times, such sports were delegitimised or outrightly outlawed in other countries, leaving the continuing popularity of Spanish bullfighting as a conspicuous exepetion and a supposed proof of Spanish bloodthirstiness.
[edit] Criticism of the Black Legend
[edit] Defense of the Spanish Inquisition
According to critics of the Black Legend, the Inquisition already existed in many European countries before it was established in Spain in 1480. It appeared in 1184, and torture was first used in 1252. That was a usual method in the medieval legal system, but its application was much more violent in the secular justice. In contrast to most witch-hunts and other medieval processes, the accused had the right to a lawyer and a trial. However, like in many medieval--and non-medieval--institutions, rules were not always followed to the letter, and it has come to public knowledge that the Pope was obliged to reproach the inquisitors several times for being "excessively zealous".
[edit] Comparisons with other colonial powers
[edit] Britain
Critics of the Black Legend note that Amerindians and Mestizos (people of European and Amerindian origins) continue to make up the majority of the population in Spanish America, while they represent a tiny proportion of the population in North America and Australia. They argue that this means that Spanish colonialism was less destructive than British colonialism.
[edit] Portugal
Critics of the Black Legend argue that Portugal has not been criticized to the extent of Spain, despite the fact that the Inquisition was also active in Portugal, that Portuguese Jews were also expelled, that slavery was more important in the Portuguese colonies than in the Spanish colonies (see Atlantic slave trade), and that a number of explorers and rulers who used violent means, such as Afonso de Albuquerque and Mem de Sá, served under the Portuguese flag.
Perhaps the long strategic alliance between England and Portugal explains why these events and practices were not seen through the same lens as similar matters in Spain. Another reason for this could be the different scale of the events (and countries) in question.
[edit] Antisemitism in other countries
Critics of the Black Legend argue that the Spanish expulsion of the Jewish community is no worse than contemporary antisemitism in other European countries. They argue that many other expulsions took place in Europe during the Middle Ages. Though the expulsion from Spain of at least 200,000 Jews and a number many folds larger of Muslims was by far the largest and most significant, this can be explained by the fact that Spain had the largest Jewish community which thrived under prior Muslim rule. [7]
| Country | Date of expulsion | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| France | 1182 | Expulsion and confiscation of goods ordered by King Philip II of France |
| England | 1290 | Ordered by Edward I of England, first great expulsion of the Middle Ages |
| France | 1306, 1321/1322 and 1394 | Philip IV of France ordered the first one of these |
| Austria | 1421 | The expulsion took place after a persecution in which 270 Jews were burned, goods were confiscated and children were subjected to forced conversion. |
| Castile (Spain) | 1492 | Ordered by the Catholic Monarchs |
| Sicily | 1492 | Ordered by Ferdinand II of Aragon |
| Lithuania | 1495 | |
| Portugal | 1496/1497 | Ordered by the king Manuel I, under pressure of the Spanish Crown. |
| Brandenburg (Germany) | 1510 | |
| Tunisia | 1535 | |
| Kingdom of Naples | 1541 | |
| Genoa | 1550 and 1567 | |
| Bavaria | 1554 | |
| Papal States | 1569/1593 |
[edit] Other uses of the term Black Legend
The term Black Legend has been also used outside Spain. It can be referred to any person/organization/situation/period in history presented (according to the user of the term) unfairly in popular culture. Examples can be Richard III in England, Cardinal Richelieu in France, Golden Liberty in Poland and many others.
[edit] See also
- Anti-Catholicism
- Bullfighting
- Colonial mentality
- Hispanic culture in the Philippines
- History of the west coast of North America
- Lucrezia Borgia
- New Laws
- Philip II of Spain
- Population history of American indigenous peoples
- Slavery
- Spanish Armada
- Spanish colonization of the Americas
- Spanish culture
- Spanish Empire
- Spanish Inquisition
- The Inquisition myth
- Valladolid debate
[edit] Notes
- ^ Juderías, Julián, La Leyenda Negra (2003; 1st Edition of 1914) ISBN 84-9718-225-1
- ^ "el ambiente creado por los relatos fantásticos que acerca de nuestra patria han visto la luz pública en todos los países, las descripciones grotescas que se han hecho siempre del carácter de los españoles como individuos y colectividad, la negación o por lo menos la ignorancia sistemática de cuanto es favorable y hermoso en las diversas manifestaciones de la cultura y del arte, las acusaciones que en todo tiempo se han lanzado sobre España..."
- ^ a b Carbia, Rómulo D., Historia de la leyenda negra hispano-americana (2004; 1st Ed. 1943) ISBN 84-95379-89-9
- ^ «...abarca la Leyenda en su más cabal amplitud, es decir, en sus formas típicas de juicios sobre la crueldad, el obscurantismo y la tiranía política. A la crueldad se le ha querido ver en los procedimientos de que se echara mano para implantar la Fe en América o defenderla en Flandes; al obscurantismo, en la presunta obstrucción opuesta por España a todo progreso espiritual y a cualquiera actividad de la inteligencia; y a la tiranía, en las restricciones con que se habría ahogado la vida libre de los españoles nacidos en el Nuevo Mundo y a quienes parecería que se hubiese querido esclavizar sine die.»
- ^ Powell, Philip Wayne, Tree of Hate (1985, 1st Ed. 1971) ISBN 465-08750-7
- ^ La Leyenda Negra (1997) by Alfredo Alvar; p. 5 «...cuidadosa distorsión de la historia de un pueblo, realizada por sus enemigos, para mejor combatirle. Y una distorsión lo más monstruosa posible, a fin de lograr el objetivo marcado: la descalificación moral de ese pueblo, cuya supremacía hay que combatir por todos los medios».
- ^ A Brief Chronology of anti-semitism (accessed 23 Jan 2006), which in turn cites Anti-Semitism (1974) Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem ISBN 0-7065-1327-4.
[edit] References
- Kamen, Henry, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763. New York: HarperCollins. 2003. ISBN 0-06-093264-3
- 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.
- Maltby, William S., The Black Legend in England. Duke University Press, Durham, 1971, ISBN 0-8223-0250-0.
- Julian Lock, How Many Tercios Has the Pope?' The Spanish War and the Sublimation of Elizabethan Anti-Popery, History, 81, 1996.
- M. G. Sanchez, Anti-Spanish Sentiment in English Literary and Political Writing, 1553-1603 (Phd Diss; University of Leeds, 2004)
- Frank Ardolino, Apocalypse and Armada in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Studies, 1995).
- Sverker Arnoldsson, 'La Leyenda Negra: Estudios Sobre Sus Orígines,' Göteborgs Universitets Årsskrift, 66:3, 1960
- Eric Griffin, 'Ethos to Ethnos: Hispanizing 'the Spaniard' in the Old World and the New,' The New Centennial Review, 2:1, 2002.
- Andrew Hadfield, 'Late Elizabethan Protestantism, Colonialism and the Fear of the Apocalypse,' Reformation, 3, 1998.
