The
Black Legend (in Spanish, leyenda negra) is the
depiction of Spain and the Spaniards as bloodthirsty and cruel, greedy and fanatical, in excess of
reality. This term was coined by Julián Juderías in his 1914 book La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica (The black legend and the historical truth).
This is contrasted with the White Legend (in Spanish, leyenda
rosa, which means rosy legend)
which promoted an idealized view of Spaniards. Needless to say, both
expressions are themselves highly colored and not propitious for a neutral
historical analysis except of folkloric perceptions.
|
Contents
[hide] |
[edit]
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, creating a
great hate towards Catalans. The Valencian pope Alexander VI became almost a 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 economical 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."
[edit]
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).
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 (Short
Account of the Destruction of the Indies),
a polemical and arguably exaggerated account of the excesses which accompanied
colonization, in which he compares the natives with tame ewes and blames
Spaniards for the murder of 30,000,000 to 50,000,000 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. Mitocondrial 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.
Another
early source is Girolamo Benzoni's Historia nuovo (New History), first published in Venice in 1565.
The
Duke of Alva's actions in the Netherlands, sent to stamp out heresy
and political unrest in August 1567 contributed to the Black Legend, in a part of Europe where printing
presses were a constant source of heterodox opinion. One of Alva's first acts
was to gain control of the book industry; in one 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 libels against
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 17th century, Barcelona, the capital
of Catalonia that had by then been unwillingly absorbed into the Spanish
monarchy dominated by Castille, was the
great producer of these libels.
[edit]
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.
[edit]
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.
[edit]
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.
[edit]
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.
[edit]
Contrasting
to the Black Legend is a "White Legend" (in Spanish, "leyenda rosa", "rosy
legend"). Although this addresses many matters, it is most notable in
portraying Spain as uniquely benevolent during the conquest of the Americas.
For
example, in dealing with Hernando Cortes's conquest of
Mexico, the White Legend emphasizes that Cortes'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.
Similarly,
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.
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.