Black legend
[1] Although this 17th-century propaganda was based in real events from the Spanish colonization of the Americas, which involved atrocities, the theory of the Leyenda Negra suggests that it often employed lurid and exaggerated depictions of violence, and ignored similar behavior by other powers.
[citation needed] The use of the term leyenda negra to refer specifically to a biased, anti-Spanish depiction of history gained currency in the first two decades of the 20th century, and is most associated with Julián Juderías.
Juderías, who worked at the Spanish Embassy in Russia, had noticed (and denounced) the spread of anti-Russian propaganda in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom and was interested in its possible long-term consequences.
In La leyenda Negra, he 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.
In Tree of Hate (1971),[7] Historian Charles Gibson described it as "the accumulated tradition of propaganda and hispanophobia according to which the Spanish Empire is considered cruel, intolerant, degenerate, exploitative and sanctimonious above reality.
His book provides examples of what he viewed as divergent treatment of Spain and other powers, and illustrates how this allows for a double narrative that taints Americans' view of Hispanic America as a whole: Spaniards who came to the New World seeking opportunities beyond the prospects of their European environment, are contemptuously called cruel and greedy "goldseekers," or other opprobrious epithets virtually synonymous with "Devils"; but Englishmen who sought New World opportunities are more respectfully called "colonists," or "homebuilders," or "seekers after liberty."
Such a reading of Spanish history was overly simplistic but promoters of American exceptionalism found it useful to see Spain as an example of what would happen to a country whose fundamental values were antithetical to those of the United States.
"According to Julián Marías, the creation of the Spanish black legend was not an exceptional phenomenon -similar disinformation and fabrication campaigns have affected most global powers of the past, such as Ottoman Turkey or Russia- but its persistence and integration into mainstream historiography is.
[10] He believes that some Hispanicists: ...make an effort to justify the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the best way possible, as they were very conscious of the excesses committed by the "Black Legend", a set of ideas that are characterised by their intellectual coarseness.
[21] In his Short Account, de las Casas underscores the innocence of the indigenous peoples while comparing the Spanish conquistadors to "ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days.
According to scholar William B. Maltby, "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.
Sent in August 1567 to counter political unrest in a part of Europe where printing presses encouraged a variety of opinions (especially against the Catholic Church), Alba seized control of the publishing industry; several printers were banished, and at least one was executed.
"[46] 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.
In an interview with a local newspaper, Larmuseau compared the persistence in popular memory of the actions of the Spanish with the lesser attention given to the Austrians, the French and the Germans who also occupied the Low Countries and participated in violence against their inhabitants.
[48] Sverker Arnoldsson of the University of Gothenburg supports Juderías' hypothesis of a Spanish black legend in European historiography and identifies its origins in medieval Italy, unlike previous authors (who date it to the 16th century).
The identification of the occupier with oppression was part of the widely spread anti-Spanish propaganda known as the black legend, whose artistic products include Manzoni's "The Betrothed" (set in 17th-century Milan) or Verdi's "Don Carlos".
Thus when Bartolomé de las Casas wrote his criticism of certain governmental policies in the New World, his limited, specific rhetorical purpose was ignored.According to William S. Maltby, Italian writings lack a "conducting theme": a common narrative which would form the Spanish black legend in the Netherlands and England.
"[55] Spanish statesman Antonio Pérez del Hierro, who served as the secretary to Philip II of Spain before fleeing to France and then England after being arrested, wrote Pedacos de Historia o Relaciones, which was published in London by English printer Richard Field in 1594.
A violently hispanophobic preacher and pamphleteer, Thomas Scott, would echo this sort of epithet a generation later, in the 1620s, when he urged England to go to war against "those wolvish Antichristians" instead of accepting the Spanish match.
Among many other similar affirmations, he is quoted as saying: —Johann Fischart, Geschichtklitterung (1575).—Luther[64]Proponents such as Powell,[7] Mignolo[66] and Roca Barea[12] allege that the Spanish Black Legend prevails in most of Europe, especially Protestant nations and France, and the Americas.
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.
Countless manifestos and proclamations were published quoting and praising Las Casas, poems and hymns describing the depraved nature of the "Spaniards", letters and pamphlets designed to advance the patriotic cause.
[72] One of the first was the Peruvian Juan Pablo Vizcardo y Guzmán in his Carta dirigida a los españoles americanos por uno de sus compatriotas, accusing the metropolis of the serious exploitation suffered, summarizing the situation as «ingratitude, injustice, servitude and desolation».
These ideas passed into literature with the Generation of '98, in texts by Pío Baroja, Azorín and Antonio Machado: «[Castilla...] a piece of the planet crossed by the wandering shadow of Caín»; reaching in some extremes to masochism and the inferiority complex.
[86] According to Phillip Powell, the leading historians of the United States in the 19th century, Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, and John Lothrop Motley, would also write History tinged with the black legend, texts that remain important in later American historiography.
[citation needed] Thus, the Americans in the Philippines developed a narrative with they belittled Spain, following the traditional lines of the Black Legend, as a feudal, exploitative and oppressive power, while also praising the Hispanic legacy in the Filipino (on a more social than political level), especially their conversion of "savages" to Christianity, but at the cost of underestimating Filipino customs (many of Hispanic origin by Catholic tradition, which the Americans considered a mistake for the Spanish to seek to achieve cultural syncretism with the barbaric and pagan).
Historian John Tate Lanning argued that the most detrimental impact of the Black Legend was to reduce the Spanish colonization of the Americas (and the resulting culture that emerged) to "three centuries of theocracy, obscurantism, and barbarism.
[101] Other proponents of the continuity theory include musicologist Judith Etzion[102] and Roberto Fernandez Retamar,[103] and Samuel Amago who, in his essay "Why Spaniards Make Good Bad Guys" analyzes the persistence of the legend in contemporary European cinema.
Molina Martinez points to the classic text of Spanish Americanists during the Franco period, Rómulo Carbia's Historia de la leyenda negra hispanoamericana, as a work with a strong ideological motivation which frequently fell into arguments which could be qualified as part of the White Legend, while also giving more current examples of the trope.
[17] While recognising the general merit of Hanke's work, Keen suggests that the United States' contemporary imperial ventures in the Caribbean and the Philippines had led him to idealise the Spanish Empire as an analogy for American colonialism.
