Spanish Black Legend

The Duke of Alba in an anonymous engraving from around 1572. The Duke is shown eating a child with one hand while holding bags of money with the other. Behind him is a hydra with the heads of Granvelle and the cardinals of Guise and Lorraine. At his feet lie the beheaded corpses of the Count of Egmont and Philip de Montmorency. A winged demon holding a rosary blows air into his ear with a bellows.

The Black Legend is an anti-Spanish propaganda movement that began in the 16th century. It was originally promoted by English, French, Dutch, German and other writers. Its initial aim was to reduce the prestige and influence of the Spanish Empire during its Golden Age. It later sought to discredit the Empire as part of a strategy to turn public opinion against it. This invariably led to internal strife, followed by a power vacuum that was then exploited to seize its possessions.

Among other factors, the invention of the printing press, and its development mainly in countries that were declared enemies of Spain, was a fundamental catalyst in the spread and consolidation of the Black Legend. The capacity to print large quantities of books and pamphlets allowed negative stereotypes about Spain to spread quickly and take root in the European collective consciousness.

Although it originated more than three centuries ago in times of fierce political, commercial and religious rivalry, the Spanish Black Legend has survived to the present day. It takes the form of falsified, clearly anti-Spanish interpretations of historical episodes such as the Conquest of America, the Inquisition or the Reconquista, now spread through new audiovisual media, of which important sectors of Hollywood are among its greatest exponents.

Definition of the Black Legend

The Diccionario de la lengua española of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language defines the Black Legend (leyenda negra) as "an unfavorable and generally unfounded account about someone or something."

Authorship of the term "Black Legend" is usually attributed to Julián Juderías, although the true origin of the term is unknown. At least Emilia Pardo Bazán and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez used the term in its current sense earlier. Julián Juderías, however, did the most to spread it. In 1914 he described the concept in his book La Leyenda Negra as:

[...] the atmosphere created by the fantastic accounts about our homeland that have been published in every country; the grotesque descriptions that have always been made of the character of the Spanish, both as individuals and as a collective; 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 have been hurled at Spain in every age, based on facts that are exaggerated, misinterpreted or entirely false; and, finally, the claim, contained in apparently respectable and truthful books and often reproduced, commented on and expanded in the foreign Press, that our Homeland constitutes, from the standpoint of tolerance, culture and political progress, a lamentable exception within the group of European nations.

— Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra (1914)

The second classic work on the subject is Historia de la Leyenda Negra hispano-americana by Rómulo D. Carbia. Juderías placed more emphasis on the European side of the legend, while the Argentine Carbia focused on its American side. Carbia gave a broader definition of the concept:

[...] it encompasses the Legend in its fullest extent, that is, in its typical forms of judgments about cruelty, obscurantism and political tyranny. Cruelty has been sought in the methods used to implant the Faith in America or to defend it in Flanders. Obscurantism has been sought in the supposed obstruction that Spain placed in the way of all spiritual progress and of any activity of the intellect. Tyranny has been sought in the restrictions with which the free life of the Spanish born in the New World was supposedly stifled, as though there had been a wish to enslave them sine die.

— Rómulo D. Carbia, Historia de la leyenda negra hispano-americana (1943)

After Juderías and Carbia, many other authors have defined and used the concept.

In 1944 the American Council on Education was concerned about the anti-Hispanic bias of the educational system and teaching materials in the U.S.. In a long report, it defined the concept as follows:

The "Black Legend" is a term long used by Spanish writers to denote the ancient body of propaganda against the Iberian peoples which began [sic] in sixteenth century England and has since been a handy weapon for the rivals of Spain and Portugal in the religious, maritime, and colonial wars of those four centuries.

— American Council on Education

In his book Tree of Hate (1971), Philip Wayne Powell defines the black legend essentially as the belief that:

The basic premise of the black legend is that the Spanish have historically shown themselves to be exceptionally cruel, intolerant, tyrannical, obscurantist, lazy, fanatical, greedy and treacherous. In other words, they are held to differ so greatly from other peoples in these traits that the Spanish and the history of Spain must be seen and understood in terms not ordinarily used to describe and interpret other peoples.

— Philip Wayne Powell, Tree of hate (1971)

A more recent author, Manuel Fernández Álvarez, has defined the black legend as:

A careful distortion of the history of a people, carried out by its enemies, the better to fight it. And a distortion as monstrous as possible, so as to achieve the set goal: the moral disqualification of that people, whose supremacy must be fought by every means.

— Manuel Fernández Álvarez

For the philosopher Julián Marías, the black legend is an extremely unusual phenomenon in the course of World History. He describes it as follows:

The Black Legend consists in this: starting from a specific point, which we may assume to be true, condemnation and disqualification are extended to the entire country throughout its entire history, including the future. That is the original peculiarity of the Black Legend. In the case of Spain, it began at the start of the 16th century. It grew denser in the 17th century, sprouted again with new impetus in the 18th (it will be necessary to ask why), and it revives on any pretext, never expiring.

— Julián Marías, España inteligible (1985)

The racist component

From the perspective of the northern European countries, Spain was always seen as a place where the mixing of different races and cultures prevailed. Celts, Iberians, Celtiberians, Tartessians, Turdetani, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Suebi, Visigoths, Berbers, Arabs, Hebrews, and other peoples took turns invading, or simply settling in, the Iberian Peninsula, long before Spain even existed as a country, leaving their genetic imprint there.

This kind of racial and cultural exchange, which had always been the norm in Spain, horrified and disgusted the elites of the European countries that were Spain's rivals for the conquest of the world. Because of their backward conceptions of racial and genetic matters, these elites could not comprehend how a population that was the result of numerous crossings between races, races that by their reasoning were supposedly inferior, could achieve greater accomplishments than those of countries made up of races considered "pure". These racist criticisms also extended to Spanish rulers, as in the case of those aimed at Philip II, whom various European writers disparaged as a New Christian, a Saracen, or a Jew, as they pleased.

The prevailing idea in the Europe of the time was that Spanish Christians had allowed coexistence with Jews and Muslims for centuries, and as a result they were an impure people. When Erasmus of Rotterdam was invited to Spain by Cardinal Cisneros to teach at the historic University of Alcalá in 1517, he declined the invitation with his famous "Non placet Hispania" ("Spain does not please me"), claiming that "Jews abound in Italy; in Spain, there are hardly any Christians".

Portrait of Martin Luther

Among the sixteenth-century German Protestants of the same opinion, Martin Luther stood out to a great extent; he wrote of the Spaniards that "sunt plerunque Marani, Mamelucken" ("most of them are Marranos, Mamluks"). Luther is considered one of the fathers of antisemitism and of Hispanophobia, and a promoter of the Black Legend, owing to proclamations such as "tolerabilius ese vivere sub Turca quam Hispania, nam Turcam confirmatio regno servare iustitiam, sed Hispanos plane esse bestias" ("it is more tolerable to live under Turkish rule than under Spanish"), conveniently omitting any reference to the military campaigns in which his own compatriots fought and died alongside the Spaniards to halt Ottoman expansionism. Luther also accused the Spaniards of "practicing coitus between men and women in ways contrary to the natural manner", though without explaining very clearly what, in his view, the "natural manner" of practicing coitus was. Nor is it possible to understand how he could have reached such a conclusion, unless he had been a direct witness to a sufficiently high number of such events to assume that the size of the observed probabilistic sample was enough to reach a general judgment about all the Spaniards of the time. This, however, would cast serious doubt on Luther's own decency and morality.

It was because of this racism prevailing in the Europe of the Middle Ages that only in Spain could there be examples of figures such as Juan Latino, a Black African brought to Europe by Portuguese slave traders, who ended up becoming a writer, humanist, musician and Latin teacher, and came to hold the Chair of Grammar and Latin Language at the University of Granada in the sixteenth century, during the period known as the European Renaissance. Nor would it have been possible, in any of the countries that fostered the Black Legend, to create an institution such as the Toledo School of Translators, where works by Greek, Arab, Jewish, and even Asian philosophers were translated, since many of them were strictly forbidden in most European centers of learning.

The disparaging expression "Africa begins at the Pyrenees", which has been used to try to discredit Spain since the eighteenth century, is attributed to Alexandre Dumas. Another similar phrase, "If the Spaniard were Muslim he would be a complete African", was coined by the also French Stendhal. However, the close bond that Spain has had both with Africa and with Europe has also led some Spanish intellectuals to use that expression as a source of pride, as was the case of Miguel de Unamuno in Sobre la independencia de la patria (1908).

Coinciding with the arrival of new scientific advances in genetics, new theories about human races, and the rise in fashion of multiculturalism and globalism in the countries that propagated the Spanish Black Legend, one observes that their literary output no longer mentions the multi-ethnic and multicultural past of the Spaniards, and instead seeks to make people believe that the Spaniards were in fact terrible racists, enemies of other races. This is a nonsense that is completely refuted not only by the varied genetic makeup that makes it impossible to speak of a Spanish race, but also by the numerous laws drafted in the territories conquered by the Spaniards, which were pioneering in recognizing the rights of the indigenous peoples. But despite such unanswerable arguments, the discourse of the propagators of the Black Legend changed radically from "Africa begins at the Pyrenees" to the idea of a supposedly racist Spain that hated not only Africa, but all other peoples that did not belong to the "Spanish race".

In the same way, there is an attempt to make people believe that the mestizo society of the Spanish colonies was governed by racist laws based on skin color, and that marriage between people of different races was even prohibited, when the documented reality is that as early as 1503 the Catholic Monarchs sent ordinances to the governors of the Americas urging them to encourage mixed marriages, which were validated by a Real Cédula of 1514. By comparison, in the United States, one of the countries from which, ironically, the greatest falsehoods about the alleged racist character of the Spaniards were (and still are) published, mixed marriages were legalized only in 1967, when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled the "anti-miscegenation" laws unconstitutional.

The Italian origin

The historian Sverker Arnoldsson of the University of Gothenburg, in his book La leyenda negra. Estudios sobre sus orígenes, places the origin of the Black Legend in medieval Italy, unlike other earlier authors who place it in the sixteenth century. Arnoldsson relies on the studies of Benedetto Croce and Arturo Farinelli to assert that the Italy of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was eminently hostile to Spain. In fact, Arnoldsson divides the Black Legend in Italy into two parts: the older one (from the beginning of the fourteenth century), anti-Aragonese and anti-Catalan, and a more modern one that took shape from 1500 onward and has persisted since.

To the Aragonese conquests and trade, other factors would be added to feed the Black Legend, among them cultural ones, such as the feeling of superiority of Italian humanism as heir to Rome; moral ones, which emphasized the emigration of prostitutes and the relaxed atmosphere surrounding the Valencian Pope Alexander VI in Rome; and racial ones, such as the view of the Spaniards as an inferior people, as "marrani" mixed with Jews, Muslims and other African peoples.

Anti-Aragonese sentiment

In its first form, the Black Legend begins with the political influence of the Crown of Aragon in certain territories of Italy in the thirteenth century. The presence of Aragonese princes, courtiers, soldiers and mercenaries (and even pirates) in Italy led to a reaction from local society, above all from the elites who considered themselves heirs of Roman Antiquity. Spanish hidalgos began to acquire a reputation for being "rough, ignorant, without intellectual interests" and ridiculously ceremonious.

Aragonese expansion in southern Italy also coincided with the rise of trade in Barcelona and Valencia, which became competitors of the northern Italian cities from 1300 onward, above all in the western Mediterranean markets. The reaction, once again, would be the spread of an image of avarice and infamous cunning of the Catalan merchants.

A third point in the Italians' perception of the Crown of Aragon, and by extension of the Iberian Peninsula, was the immorality and excessive sensuality they believed they saw in the papal courts of Callixtus III and his nephew Alexander VI, both of Valencian origin, in the Aragonese court of Naples, and above all in the Valencian courtesans, who were very well known in Italy. Finally, non-Christian elements, above all Jewish and Islamic influence, were viewed with distrust. The Jews expelled in 1492 arrived in great numbers in the Italian cities, so that "Marrano" came to be confused with "Spaniard", to the point that Pope Julius II called his predecessor Alexander VI a "circumcised marrano". The enmity between Spaniards and Italians reached the point that in 1503, after the death of Alexander VI, there was a violent persecution against the detested Catalan nepotes, which resulted in some deaths.

Although the anti-Aragonese Black Legend originated in Italy, it spread to the eastern Mediterranean with the expeditions of the Almogavars, who had a decisive influence on the fear and rejection they acquired in that region, which made famous the imprecation or insult "May Catalan vengeance strike you!".

Anti-Castilian sentiment

Sack of Rome of 6 May 1527. In an engraving by Martin van Heemskerck (1527).

Until 1500, in the eyes of the Italians, the Aragonese represented Aragonese, Catalans, Valencians, Castilians and Portuguese alike; in short, the Spaniards. This situation changed from 1500 onward, when Castile began to hold political, economic and military preeminence over the other kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula. During the sixteenth century, military interventions by Spanish troops in Italy became widespread, bringing not only the consequent trail of destruction and death that wars carry, but also countless minor conflicts caused by quartered soldiers who did not receive their pay on time. Important in the formation of Italian opinion were the Sack of Prato of 1512, in which between 500 and 5,600 deaths are estimated, depending on the sources, and above all the Sack of Rome of 1527, even though German and Italian troops also took part.

The image of the cruel, cunning and rapacious Spaniard gradually spread. In 1559 Marcantonio da Mula remarked:

[...] è dubbio se questa brava gente abbia dato piu utile o più danno ai suoi signori da parecchi anni in quà: perchè, si come sono stati causa di donarli delle vittorie, così hanno fatto perder loro di molti cuori e volontà de' popoli col maltrattarli, e il cuore de'sudditi è la maggior fortalezza che habbia il principe.

[...] it is doubtful whether these brave people have been more useful or more harmful to their lords for some years now, because, just as they have been the cause of giving them victories, they have also made them lose many hearts and the goodwill of the people by mistreating them, and the heart of the subjects is the greatest fortress a prince has.

— Marcantonio da Mula, «Relazione di Filippo II Re di Spagna letta in Senato» (1559)

The government in Naples and other dependencies of the Spanish Crown was also a cause of animosity among the population. Thus, for example, even though taxes were not excessive, there were numerous complaints. The Inquisition provoked many protests against the government, to the point that discontent over the familiars contributed greatly to the riots of 1511 and 1516 in Sicily. In Naples, the mere rumor that the episcopal Inquisition would be replaced by the Spanish Inquisition produced a very violent riot in 1547. The fear, which in Naples led to the storming of the Spanish soldiers' barracks and the slitting of many throats, was caused in part by nationalist sentiment, since the Inquisition was rightly seen as a political instrument of the King. Finally, even Spanish justice, which was "excessively" impartial, earned the enmity of the aristocracy and the privileged classes.

On the cultural level, the Italians considered themselves superior to the Spaniards, reducing Spanish culture to chivalric novels, which intellectuals attacked on moral, intellectual and aesthetic grounds. Spanish influence in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was enormous, to the point that learning and writing Castilian was fashionable, and the chivalric novels Tirante el Blanco and Amadís de Gaula were the most widely read books in both Italy and Spain. This awareness was all the more painful because the superiority of Spanish arms was evident to them. The criticism extended to music, and the scholar Judith Etzion places the beginning of the Black Legend in Western musicological historiography in El melopeo y maestro, a book in Spanish published in Naples in 1613 by Pietro Cerone.

The German origin

Arnoldsson has identified a second origin of the Black Legend in Germany. German humanism was very nationalist and arose rather in opposition to Italian humanism, extolling the Germanic ancestors against the Roman enemy. However, in both Ulrich von Hutten and Martin Luther, the two most influential authors of the early sixteenth century, what was Italian was conflated with das Welsche, that is, the Latin or Romance world, which included France, Portugal and Spain, with the nuance of "false, immoral, foreign as opposed to what is national".

Luther felt an evident enmity toward Spain, even though the country was not yet the military and cultural power it would later become, and his thought had an undeniable subsequent influence. For Luther, the Spaniards were thieves, false, proud and lustful. This distrust may have several origins, among which Arnoldsson highlights:

• the identification of Italy, Spain and papism, whereby the Spaniards were characterized as cruel, rapacious, immoral and false;
• his antisemitism, since he considered the Spaniards to be descendants of the Jews, "sunt plerunque Marani, Mamalucken";
• his fear of a Spanish and Turkish invasion, peoples he considered close to each other,

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 were published, in which he gave his well-known opinion of the Spaniards.

However, it would not be until the Schmalkaldic War that these opinions spread among the German people. The war propaganda of the Schmalkaldic League was very nationalist and identified its enemy, the Emperor Charles V, with foreigners, with Rome, Catholicism, the Pope and Spain, even though among the supporters of Charles V there were also Germans and Protestants: they did not want to be "governed by Spaniards". This was the beginning of the image of the King of Spain as the champion of Catholicism, partly promoted by the Crown itself. But above all, this hatred was fed by the outrages committed by the troops of Charles V, made up of Spaniards, Italians and Germans.

Toward the end of the sixteenth century a clearly racist tinge was introduced into the Black Legend under the influence of French and Dutch pamphlets: the significant proportion of Jewish converts and Moors among the troops, and their dark complexion and stature, were anathematized by German intellectuals.

[...] Spaniern [...], die essen gern weiss Brot vnd küssen gern weisse Meidlein, vnd sind sie stiffelbraun vnd Pechschwartz wie König Balthasar mit seinem Affen.

The Spaniards eat white bread and kiss fair women with great pleasure, and they are as brown and black as King Balthazar and his monkey.

— Johann Fischart, Geschichtklitterung (1575)

The Jewish origin

The historian Philip Wayne Powell adds a third origin among the Jews expelled from Spain. Powell places the beginning of criticism of Spain by Jewish populations in 1480, with the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, which was directed mainly against crypto-Jews and false converts. But it was from the expulsion of 1492 onward that this opinion became widespread. Although they had previously been expelled from almost every European country, in no other had they been so deeply rooted during the Middle Ages, having lived what has been called a Golden Age, which gave this expulsion special significance.

Studies by Kaplan, Yerushalmi, Mechoulan and Jaime Contreras show that many expelled Jewish intellectuals collaborated in spreading the negative image of Spain. The most important Sephardic community was in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, with two synagogues. Its activity, "poco affectos al servicio de Su Majestat" ("little devoted to the service of His Majesty"), even provoked protests by the Spanish ambassadors before the Archduke in Brussels. The Inquisition was especially hated, considered the "fourth beast spoken of by the prophet Daniel", a denatured justice, a heap of evils, which had corrupted society. The criticism spread to Flanders and Venice, where Sephardim had also settled. Thus, the communities publicized the executions of the Inquisition, such as the one that took place in 1655 in Córdoba.

The Sephardim showed gratitude to their new homeland during the Eighty Years' War: just as Spain was a "land of idolatry" and of slavery, like that of Egypt, whose rulers suffer the curse of Yahweh, Holland, on the other hand, was the land of freedom, upon which the God of Israel would shower all blessings, as Daniel Levi de Barrios or Menasseh Ben Israel (formerly called Manoel Soeiro) wrote. They also used their power within the publishing industry, both to support the Dutch in their struggle and to spread criticism of Spain, overlooking the fact that one of the most common invectives directed from the Netherlands and other European countries against the Spanish people centered precisely on their perceived Jewish and Muslim ancestry.

Spanish critics

Various historians, beginning with Juderías and Carbia, and continuing with Maltby, García Cárcel or Español Bouché, have pointed out the importance of Spanish self-criticism, both in the sixteenth century and in modern times, in the genesis of the Black Legend. This self-criticism has no comparison with that found in other countries, either in the sixteenth century or in later colonizations.

The Brevísima relación

After the discovery of America in 1492, a debate arose in the Crown of Castile over how the indigenous populations should be treated. Initially the system of encomiendas had been introduced, very similar to the one that had been applied to the Morisco populations of Granada and also to the mit'a, which the Incas had used in pre-colonial times.

Many clergymen and intellectuals protested against this system, considering it cruel and inhumane, among them Antonio de Montesinos, Tomás Ortiz, Vicente Valverde, Francisco de Benavides, Martín de Calatayud, Bartolomé de la Peña, Juan Fernández Angulo, Domingo de Santo Tomás, Cristóbal de Molina and Luis de Morales. This continuous effort bore fruit with the promulgation by Charles I of Spain of the New Laws in 1542, which prohibited new encomiendas and ordered that existing ones pass to the Crown upon the death of the encomenderos. Although it had relative success, the measure did not manage to silence the dispute.

Within this atmosphere of controversy, Bartolomé de las Casas and his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias undoubtedly stood out. The work purports to describe the cruelties committed by some Spaniards in America.

Into these gentle sheep, endowed by their Maker and Creator with the qualities mentioned above, the Spaniards entered as soon as they came to know them, like most cruel wolves and tigers and lions starved for many days. And for forty years now, up to this day, they have done nothing else, and on this very day they are doing it, but tear them to pieces, kill them, distress them, afflict them, torment them and destroy them by strange and new and varied ways of cruelty never before seen, read or heard of, of which a few will be told below, to such a degree that, there having been on the island of Hispaniola over three million souls whom we saw, today there are not two hundred persons of its natives.

— Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias (1552)

Engraving by Theodor de Bry illustrating the Brevísima, p. 45, corresponding to the following text:

This man had this custom: when he went to make war on towns or provinces, he took as many of the already subjugated Indians as he could, to make war on the others; and since he did not feed the ten or twenty thousand men he took, he allowed them to eat the Indians they captured, and so there was in his camp a most solemn butchery of human flesh, where in his presence they killed the children and roasted them, and they killed a man just for his hands and feet, which they held to be the best morsels.

It must be pointed out that Bartolomé de las Casas went so far as to write outright absurdities, such as that Hispaniola was inhabited by several million indigenous people, that there were twenty thousand rivers very rich in gold, or that the Spaniards had caused a demographic catastrophe in America "killing a thousand cuentos of people (1,000 million indigenous people) in those very vast lands", something totally absurd, since the total world population at that time was around 450 million, which would be equivalent to saying that a few hundred people had somehow managed to kill more than twice the population of the entire planet. However, this was no obstacle to his writings being used to spread the Black Legend that extended throughout Europe, especially among Spain's rivals such as England, France, and the Netherlands, which portrayed the Spaniards as brutally oppressive, even though the actions of those same countries proved to be far more nefarious and degrading toward the indigenous peoples, and even though they had no legislation of any kind protecting local populations, much less a figure such as the Protector of the Indians like that of Bartolomé de las Casas.

But the text of Las Casas was not the only one used abroad to demonstrate Spain's excesses in America. The accounts of Girolamo Benzoni, Francisco López de Gómara and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés were also used by foreign historians, philosophers, polemicists and propagandists. For example, Benzoni's work, which went through more than 30 editions, presents the conquest as a campaign of plunder and extermination; the conquistadors as cruel and bloodthirsty, greedy and interested only in enriching themselves, cowardly, dirty, treacherous and responsible for the disappearance of the indigenous peoples; the friars "do by day things that others would be ashamed to do by night".

The texts about Spanish excesses were used to support claims about the cruel and greedy character of the Spaniard in all kinds of later writings. Furthermore, they served rival powers as an argument to deny, on moral grounds, the Iberian monopoly in America. One of the most interesting phenomena of the Black Legend is that, on the basis of one specific event, the conquest, that is, the first 50 years, condemnation and discredit have been extended to the 300 years of colonization and to all its aspects.

Criticism of the Inquisition

The Spanish Inquisition is a recurring theme of the Spanish Black Legend, although, hypocritically, any mention of the victims of religious persecution in the countries from which these criticisms are made is avoided. Thus, for example, French authors never mention that in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre alone more people were killed for religious reasons in a few days than all those who died as a result of Inquisition trials over centuries. Mention is also avoided of the witch hunts, which according to the German historian Wolfgang Behringer caused 40,000 to 60,000 victims throughout Europe, of which only 500 correspond to the sum of those executed in Spain, Portugal and Italy, while France would have executed 4,000 and Germany at least 25,000.

In England, from which some of the fiercest criticism of the Inquisition came, during the reign of Elizabeth I the Act of Supremacy was reinstated, which made attendance at Protestant religious services compulsory, with penalties ranging from flogging to the death penalty. The English State promoted a system of informers whereby those who did not denounce their neighbors could end up in prison. It is estimated that at least 1,000 people who professed the Catholic faith were killed, although the targets were not only Catholics, but also Calvinists, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Mennonites and other religious groups.

Plate no. 10 by Picard in Mémoires Historiques (1716) by Louis-Ellies Dupin. One of the most typical depictions of the Inquisition since the eighteenth century.

Francisco de Encinas, with his brothers Jaime and Juan, was among the first to criticize the persecution of Protestants by the Spanish Inquisition in his account De statu belgico deque religione hispanica historia Francisci Enzinas Burgensis, published in 1545 in Spanish and in 1558 in French. According to Encinas, those in the Inquisition had nothing human about them; they lived in luxury, "they were monsters, henchmen of Satan", who plundered Spain wrapped in secrecy. A second book is attributed to Encinas, published under the pseudonym Dryander, entitled Les principaux instuments du Seigneur pour maintenir le vrai christianisme renaissant de notre temps en Espagne, published in Basel or Geneva between 1560 and 1565, in which he mentions with greater precision some cases of Protestants persecuted by the Inquisition.

Greater influence was exerted by the Sanctae Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes (An Exposition of Some Wiles of the Holy Spanish Inquisition), published in Heidelberg in 1567 under the pseudonym Reginaldus Gonzalvus Montanus. It seems that Gonzalvus was an alias of Antonio del Corro, a Spanish Protestant theologian exiled in the Netherlands. Del Corro lent credibility to his account through his knowledge of the tribunal. The book was an immediate success: between 1568 and 1570 there were two editions in English, one in French, three in Dutch, four in German and one in Hungarian, and it continued to be published and cited until the nineteenth century. The account, generally accurate, takes the form of a prisoner who goes through all the stages of the process and above all the interrogation, allowing the reader to identify with the victim. This accuracy of description conceals the fact that Del Corro presents some of the most extreme practices of the Inquisition as the rule, every accused person as innocent, every official of the Inquisition as crafty and vain, and every step in the process as a violation of natural law. Del Corro, who praised the initial purpose of the Inquisition, that is, to pursue false converts, had not foreseen the use of his book in the Black Legend, similarly to what happened with Bartolomé de las Casas. He was convinced that the Inquisition had been turned by the Dominican friars into something execrable whose real workings Philip II did not know, and that the Spanish people opposed the baleful institution.

Antonio Pérez

Antonio Pérez, former secretary of Philip II, who fell into disgrace for scheming to set the King against his brother and for selling state secrets, had to flee to Aragon in 1590, where he became the protagonist of the Alterations of Aragon. From exile, Pérez, who identified with the enemies of the King and of Castile in Aragon, published several treatises criticizing Philip II. Perhaps the most important was the one entitled Relaciones, first published in Spanish under the pseudonym "Rafael Peregrino" in Béarn in 1591, later expanded and published in 1594 in London under the title Pedaços de historia.

Attributed to José Teixeira, a Portuguese exile and supporter of the pretender to the Portuguese throne Antonio, and to Antonio Pérez, the Traicté paraenetique was published in Auch, in French, in 1597; a year later it was published again in La Rochelle and in Agen (annotated edition), and again in 1641. That same year, 1598, the first translation into Flemish was published, and in 1626 the first translation into Italian. Also in 1598, it was published in London in English under the title Treatise paraenetical, and it was reissued in 1625 under the title The Spanish Pilgrime. The Traicté paraenetique was a personal attack on Philip II, but also a criticism of Castile and the Castilians. Through the text it sought to show the internal division of the peninsula, explaining the hatred that the other peninsular kingdoms had for the Castilians. It presents the Castilians as "malignant and perverse" people, "full of pride, arrogance, tyranny and infidelity", descendants of Jews and therefore traitors who cannot be trusted. Of the King it says that "tyranny is as natural to Philip as laughter is to a man" and that he poisons everyone without distinction.

After the initial enthusiasm, Pérez came to be ignored, but his writings were used later by other authors. The Relaciones were translated into English and published in 1715 in London, possibly under government influence, at a time when England was pursuing an aggressive policy against Spain.

Protestant polemicists

In the sixteenth century, Protestants identified themselves with the heresies from the time of the conversion of the Roman Empire up to the fifteenth century, which led to the creation of martyrologies in Germany and England: collections of lives of martyrs described with great morbidity, often profusely illustrated, which circulated among the most popular classes and fanned indignation against the Catholic Church. One of the most famous, and the one that would have the greatest influence, was the Book of Martyrs (The Book of Martyrs, 1554) by John Foxe, partly thanks to the 50 engravings of torture and mistreatment that illustrated it. Although he seems to have been poorly informed and, for example, did not mention the Autos-da-fé of Valladolid, Foxe devoted an entire chapter to the Spanish Inquisition, The execrable Inquisition of Spayne.

John Foxe (1516-1587) in an engraving by George Glover.

The text contains many of the elements that would be repeated later: anyone can be tried for any trifle, the Inquisition cannot be wrong, the accused are often accused for money, out of envy or to conceal actions of the Inquisition, if no evidence is found it is invented, prisoners are isolated without any outside contact in dark dungeons where they suffer horrible tortures, etc. Foxe already warned that the baleful institution could be introduced into any country that accepted Catholicism.

From the same period is the Livre des martyrs by the Genevan publisher Jean Crespin, who had the support of Calvin. Published in 1554, it was reissued in 1564 and 1570 and finally, expanded by Simon Goulart, in 1582 and 1619.

The attacks on the Inquisition and the Catholic Church were part of a propaganda war between Catholics and Protestants that developed from the end of the sixteenth century onward.

The canonical form of the Black Legend: the independence of the Netherlands

It is in the Netherlands that all the threads mentioned come together for the first time in one of the most violent propaganda attacks against Spanish imperialism. The Emperor Charles V, born in Flanders, was treated more benignly than his son, Philip II, both by his subjects in the Netherlands and by later historians, even though the former was much more intransigent and strict than the latter. The Flemish Protestant nobles, allies of Charles V, violently opposed the government of Philip II, and to that end they began by attacking his representatives.

The first to be attacked was Antonio Perrenot de Granvela, Archbishop of Mechelen (1560) and cardinal (1561), who tried to reform the Flemish ecclesiastical organization, something that would have reduced the wealth and power of the local clergy. Granvela, who was from Franche-Comté and therefore a foreigner, was called "arch-despicable" and the "red dragon" of Spain by his enemies. The main dispute was between the Protestants and the Catholics, whom they feared for their power, with the King at their head. However, for the leaders involved, it was clear that this was a political and not a religious problem; so said the Duke of Alba and even the French ambassador. Perhaps the one who suffered the greatest attacks was the Duke of Alba, the great bête noire of the Flemish, charged with putting an end to the uprising of the Iconoclastic Fury. To that end he created the Council of Troubles, known to his enemies as the "Council of Blood", in which many of the rebels were executed, including important nobles and aristocrats such as the Count of Egmont. The Eighty Years' War was atrocious on both sides; that the Duke of Alba and Spanish cruelty are mainly what is remembered is, according to Joseph Pérez, due to the fact that history is written by the victor and the victims were considered a posteriori founding heroes of Holland. The Black Legend of the Duke of Alba, thirsty for blood, a monster of cruelty, has survived to the present day, and Dutch children are frightened with his name if they misbehave. It was not until the twentieth century that the name of the Duke of Alba could be cleared: one of the greatest generals of his time, a fine strategist, inflexible on discipline (he punished the unjustified excesses of his troops against the population), a shrewd politician, one of the most cultured men of his time, who commanded in Flanders an army of 54,000 soldiers, of whom only 7,900 were Spaniards and 30,400 were Flemish.

From the beginning, the Flemish made extensive use of propaganda, taking advantage of their thriving publishing industry, in what came to be called the "paper war". Among the libelists were the painter Lucas de Heere, the poet Van der Noot, the geographer Ortelius and many others. One of the main propagandists was Philips of Marnix of Saint-Aldegonde, a theologian closely linked to Calvin, who later went to work for William of Orange. Marnix, who had been in Germany, used every resource at his disposal: the crimes of the Spanish troops in the Schmalkaldic War, the resemblance between Spaniards and Turks, suggesting an alliance between the two, the wickedness of the Duke of Alba, etc., claims he would repeat at the Diet of Worms in 1578. The pamphleteers also appealed to fear of the Spanish Inquisition, claiming that the King wanted to introduce it into the Netherlands, using elements from previously published critical works to explain what would happen in that case. A forged document of the Holy Office was even published declaring all the Dutch guilty of lèse-majesté and threatening a general confiscation of property; a document that was considered authentic by Dutch historians until the nineteenth century.

The Apology of the Prince of Orange

William of Orange, who had become the leader of the rebels, was named stadtholder (not sovereign) of the United Provinces in 1576, so it can be assumed that the rebellion was not yet directed against the king. In 1576 the Spanish troops, after mutinying for not receiving their pay, sacked Antwerp, an event that would also become part of the Black Legend as the epitome of Spanish cruelty. That same year, Philip II put a price on the head of William of Orange, who counterattacked by publishing his Apology of the Prince of Orange. The Apologie ou Défense du très illustre Prince Guillaume [...] contre le ban et édict publié par le roy d'Espagne [...], actually written by his chaplain, Pierre L’Oyseleur, was William's definitive break with Philip II and can be considered the birth certificate of the Black Legend. The pamphlet reproduced earlier accusations against the Duke of Alba, generalizing the blame and the characteristics of cruelty, barbarism and viciousness to all Spaniards, claiming that Spanish soldiers raped women in front of their husbands and children. It also took up the Italian and German accusations of racial mixing, accusing the Spaniards of being Jews and Moors.

William of Orange (1533-1584), copy by C. Garschagen of a work by Antonio Moro.

But it did not merely reproduce earlier ideas; it also developed new arguments. It personally attacked the king, Philip II, accusing him of being a womanizer, an adulterer, of having had incestuous relations with his sister, of bigamy, of murdering his wife Elisabeth of Valois, and finally accused him of having arrested, condemned and executed his own son and heir, Carlos. All the accusations ended up forgotten, with the exception of the nickname "the Demon of the South" and the story of "Don Carlos", which from that moment on became an inseparable part of the Black Legend. Several historians took it as true, such as Pierre de Brantôme (Memoirs, 1665) and Jacques Auguste de Thou (Historia sui temporis, 1620).

In the arts, the way would be opened by César Vichard de Saint-Réal in 1672 with his work Dom Carlos. Although mostly fantasy, it was taken as real by several later authors, who would take up the plot. Thus, the Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien by Friedrich Schiller, published in 1787, was based on Saint-Réal's story and on History of Philip II by Robert Watson. The impetus Schiller gave to the subject led to the publication of several works and some operas with the same plot, the most famous of which is undoubtedly the opera Don Carlos by Giuseppe Verdi. Another new point it introduced in its criticisms was Spanish religious intolerance, which would be reflected both in the persecution of Protestants by the Inquisition,

The merit of William of Orange lies in having gathered a series of scattered pieces of information, rumors and criticisms and put them together to form a coherent and effective system of propaganda. As a result, the perception has persisted to this day that in the war in Flanders "all that is good, true and free was pitted against the powers of darkness, intolerance and superstition".

The rise of England

The reasons that drove English authors to write this kind of literature can be divided into three: the defense of the Protestant Reformation, support for government policies, and encouragement of overseas adventure. It appeared at the same time as the first national consciousnesses and stereotypes in the Renaissance. Maltby ventures that it was a propaganda instrument used by England to justify its actions and unite wills, which later became part of general historiography.

England, which viewed the revolution in the Netherlands with sympathy and even sent troops in 1585, was fertile ground for Dutch pamphlets. There were also numerous homegrown polemicists, and even Queen Elizabeth I justified her support for the rebels with her own "declaration", although she scrupulously avoided criticizing the figure of the Spanish king. But it is the chroniclers, such as Holinshed, Camden and Baker, who give a measure of the acceptability of anti-Spanish sentiment among intellectuals of critical intelligence and, therefore, of how much was transmitted to later generations. Unlike in the Netherlands themselves, no propaganda or writings favorable to Spain or Catholicism circulated in England.

The confrontation between England and Spain was inevitable after the latter received the papal bull and the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed, by which Spain claimed all territories west of the meridian 46º 37' west longitude. Because of England's weakness, Queen Elizabeth wanted to avoid a direct confrontation, so all voyages and explorations carried out by Englishmen were "unofficial" and therefore treated as acts of piracy by the Spaniards. The unpleasant encounters with the Spanish authorities were recounted in a very subjective way by the navigators who ventured westward, among whom were the privateers and slave traders Francis Drake and John Hawkins. Their adventures exerted an irresistible attraction on the local public, spreading the idea of the Spanish character as "treacherous and cruel", in which there is nothing positive. Especially important were the publications of Richard Hakluyt, who was an influential agent promoting English exploration and colonialism, and of his executor, the Reverend Samuel Purchas.

The Invincible Armada

By 1588, the undeclared war waged by the English pirates had reached a point that led Philip II to send the "Grand and Most Fortunate Armada" to invade the British Isles. The failure of the mission is well known and has become one of the most recurrent points of the Spanish Black Legend. In England it is considered one of the most brilliant moments of its history; it represents the moral and military superiority of the nation, the victory of Protestantism and liberalism over Roman obscurantism. Without the Armada, it is possible that the anti-Spanish pamphlets would have been forgotten, but by organizing a full-scale invasion attempt, in the eyes of the English, the Spaniards were demonstrating that all the accusations made up to that point were true.

Two explanations of the "defeat" were given. The first was the "Spanish character":

[...] none more glories in his Chivalry than the Spaniard: But I suppose his religion and stomach be equally poised: the one false the other faint, that what they attempt, is not to be overcome with prowess, but to suppress with multitudes: for their service in wars in either by policy to circumvent by perjury, to entail by treason, to undermine, or by some little martial practice to weaken the enemy, whom if they find valiantly to resist, their brave once cooled, they seldom or never dare give another Encounter [...]

— Robert Greene, Spanish masquerado (1589)

British satire of 1740, published in the wake of the War of the Asiento, in which the caption reads "The Spaniards build castles in the air, the British give their importance to trade".

The second was that God was on the English side, as Thomas Nash explained: "So perished our foes, so did heavens fight with us; [...]", and even the Queen herself, who asked the merchants of the Hansa:

And if the victorious hand of God had not herein derided the cunning devises and purposes of the Spaniards, if it had not scattered so great a terror to all Christendom and drenched their carcasses in the sea, what should the state of the said Hanse merchants have been?

— Elizabeth I of England

The authors of the time also exaggerated the size of the invasion, downplayed their own importance and even invented episodes that never happened. As an example, one can mention William Cecil, who claimed without blushing that the entire Spanish fleet, with its 160 ships, had been "furiously pursued" by 50 English ships in its flight around England. Another tale that has been repeated to this day was invented by Petruccio Ubaldini, a Florentine settled in England, who claimed that the explosion, for unknown reasons, in the powder magazine of one of the Spanish ships had been caused by a Flemish artilleryman, who would have killed himself in that way because a Captain of the Spanish infantry had raped his wife and daughter, "according to the custom of that country". Many pamphlets speculated on what would have happened if the Spanish troops had actually invaded the country, giving free rein to images of whips, chains and tortures. Thomas Deloney even expressed it in full detail in a long poem, devoting twenty-four stanzas solely to explaining the types and characteristics of the whips the Spaniards would use to flog the English.

In the following years, the tone of the English chronicles and pamphlets did not change. English attacks were celebrated and justified, their victories were inflated and Spanish ones ignored (or turned into English victories), spreading and entrenching the legend of Spanish military incompetence. Among the most notorious attempts to discredit the Spanish forces are the defeat of the English Armada, a resounding failure of dimensions comparable to those of the famous Spanish Invincible Armada, but which was carefully ignored and concealed, and the Battle of Cartagena de Indias, which formed part of the War of Jenkins' Ear and constituted the greatest defeat in English naval history, when a colossal fleet of 186 ships with more than 30,000 combatants was defeated by the Spanish forces, which had only 6 ships and fewer than 4,000 combatants. Perhaps victims of their own intoxication caused by the Black Legend, in England the "victory" was even celebrated in advance, and commemorative medals and coins were struck extolling the capture of Cartagena by the Anglo-American forces. These coins showed Blas de Lezo, Commander of the Spanish forces, kneeling before the English Commander Edward Vernon, surrendering his sword, with an inscription that read "The pride of Spain humbled by Ad. Vernon". After the humiliating defeat, the English King George II strictly forbade any mention whatsoever of the outcome of the defeat, and an attempt was made to withdraw all the coins from circulation, but some were kept and later sent clandestinely to Spain, to the delight of the Spanish military and rulers. However, the ban on mentioning the defeat has partly endured to this day, since the battle has been completely removed from the curriculum of British schools, and many British encyclopedias omit it entirely.

The confrontation with France and Portugal

Anti-Spanish sentiment appeared in Portugal as a result of Philip II's seizure of power in 1580. The supporters of the other pretenders and, later, both nationalisms produced a spiral of replies and counter-replies between Portuguese and Spaniards. The most successful pamphleteer was José Teixeira, mentioned above, who in his pamphlets published in England spoke as if Philip II had actually taken prisoner, loaded with chains and sent to the galleys the previous King of Portugal, Sebastian I.

Title page of the Coppie de L'Anti-Espagnol by Antoine Arnauld.

Neighborly relations between France and Spain have often been difficult, and this variable enmity was expressed in both countries in various texts, to the point of speaking of a "natural antipathy" between the two peoples, as Carlos García tried to rationalize in 1617 with the publication of La oposición y conjunción de las dos grandes luminarias de la tierra o de la antipatía natural de franceses y españoles. The first French pamphlets were produced in the third decade of the sixteenth century, during the armed confrontation between Charles I and Henry II, but they gained intensity from 1567: out of a total of 822 pamphlets, 197 were published in the 1580s and 303 in the following decade. The historian Vicente Salavert links this pamphlet offensive with a reaction of panic, through which the aim was to ridicule the object of fear. From 1635 onward, the image presented changes, and it is that of a finished and dying country.

In 1590 the Anti-Spaniard by Antoine Arnauld was published, which informed his compatriots of the

l'auarice inſatiable, de la cuauté Tigreſque, de la ſale & monſtrueueſe luxure de l'Eſpagnol, l'embraſement d'vne grande partie de ton corps, le pillage general des threſors [...] le rauiſſement de tes femmes, filles & ieunes garçõs forzes par ces Mores en la preſence de leurs peres, freres, maris, liez & garrotez aux pieds des licts [...]

[...] insatiable avarice [of the Spaniards], their cruelty greater than that of the tiger, their repugnant, monstrous and abominable lust: their burning of houses, their detestable sacking and pillage [...] their lustful and inhuman deflowering of matrons, wives and daughters, their incomparable and sodomitic rape of boys, which the semi-barbarous Spaniards committed in the presence [... of] fathers, husbands or relatives [...]

— Antoine Arnauld, Coppie de l'Anti-espagnol, faict à Paris. Deffendu par les rebelle de Sa Majesté (1594) p. 66.

In the sixteenth century, French criticisms focused on the following points:

• The character of the Spanish kings: avarice (burdensome taxation), cruelty (mistreatment of the queens) and usurpation (seizure of Navarre). Each king received his share of criticism, but Philip II above all came off badly: New Christian, Saracen, Jew, ambitious schemer, tyrant, governed by the Inquisition.
• The Spanish political system was supposedly limited and had unstable foundations. Its oppression had allegedly provoked revolts in Flanders and America, and even Basques, Asturians, Galicians and Aragonese would not tolerate Castilian arrogance.
• Religious violence against innocents, above all by the Inquisition, hypocritically avoiding mention of France's own religious violence against innocents, which caused many more victims.

One of the most important critics of the Inquisition was Pierre Bayle, who, even though his knowledge of Spain and the Spaniards was largely limited to the accounts of the Countess d'Aulnoy, assembled the various arguments of the Black Legend into a literary package of sensationalist tones that became popular reading. Other thinkers of the Enlightenment such as Montesquieu also referred to Spain as the perfect example of the poor administration of a State under the influence of the Church. His criticisms of Spain are found above all in the Persian Letters and The Spirit of the Laws.

Car il faut savoir que, lorsqu'un homme a un certain mérite en Espagne: [...] quand [...] il ne travaille plus [...] Celui qui reste assis dix heures par jour obtient précisément la moitié plus de considération qu'un autre qui n'en reste que cinq, parce que c'est sur les chaises que la noblesse s'acquiert.

It is good to know when a man has a certain merit in Spain: [...] when [...] he does not work [...] He who remains seated ten hours a day obtains half again as much consideration as he who rests five hours, because nobility is acquired in chairs.

— Montesquieu, Letter LXXVIII, Rica à Usbek, à***

The Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, with his book Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des européens dans les deux Indes ("Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the Two Indies"), blames the Inquisition for killing Spanish intellectual life: "elle [l'Espagne] resta stupide dans une profonde ignorance" ("she [Spain] remained stupid in a profound ignorance"), and is of the opinion that, in order to return Spain to the concert of nations, it was necessary to eliminate the Inquisition, so that it would be possible to bring in foreigners of all beliefs, who are the only ones who can achieve "good manufactures" in a reasonable time; native workers would take centuries to achieve the same. The French Hispanist Bartolomé Bennassar, in his work Le Voyage en Espagne, stated that the French philosophers of the Enlightenment did not moderate their critical judgment of Spain, which for them was better known for the Inquisition than for the rest of its contributions to universal culture.

One of the most important works of the century, the Encyclopédie, also extensively criticizes Spain in various articles written by Louis de Jaucourt. The Chevalier de Jaucourt takes the opportunity to launch invectives against the country and its culture in many of the articles he writes: among them, in "Spain", "Iberia", "Netherlands", "wool", "monastery", "title" (referring to titles of nobility), etc.; a burning from which only the article on wine is spared, in which he praises Spanish wines, although at the end he warns that their abuse can cause incurable diseases.

Later, the Encyclopédie méthodique entrusted the article on Spain to Masson de Morvilliers, famous for asserting that Spain had never made any useful discovery that had turned to the benefit of humanity.

The historian Ronald Hilton has given great importance to this kind of eighteenth-century image of Spain, which would have helped justify the betrayal and subsequent invasion in 1807 by Napoleon, something for which the Spanish people were supposed to feel grateful, since enlightened France was bringing its light to backward and dark Spain.

The "Yellow Legend"

De camino, Granada by Edwin Longsden Long. English travelers not only wrote books, but also brought their impressions to the canvas.

The historian Enrique Moradiellos places the transformation of the commonplaces of the Black Legend during the Napoleonic Invasion of Spain, when the English suddenly found an ally against Napoleon Bonaparte in the Spanish people. All the negative commonplaces of the legend became positive: "Hispanic cruelty became indomitable bravery, execrable fanaticism became untamable passion, and haughty arrogance became patriotic and individualist pride." Thus, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Black Legend had been losing strength, and old commonplaces were replaced by others, by a romantic vision of the country, which is what has come to be called the "Yellow Legend". Interest in Spain increased, but in an exotic Spain, not merely different but exceptional, identified basically with what was Andalusian. The romantic commonplace spread of "the Arab past, the haughtiness of the Spanish character, feminine beauty, the fondness for bullfighting, superstitious popular religiosity...". The English and Germans above all wanted to see in the country the ideals of honor, patriotic and religious fervor, the pure, primary (and somewhat savage) values that civilization was destroying in Europe. On the other hand, legitimate interest in Spanish history and culture also began: Hispanism and the Hispanists.

Various authors visited Spain to experience for themselves that "Orient in the West", among whom one can mention Théophile Gautier, Prosper Mérimée, George Sand, George Borrow, known as "Jorgito el Inglés" ("Little George the Englishman"), Alfred de Musset, Alexandre Dumas père, to whom the phrase "Africa begins at the Pyrenees" has been attributed, Alexander von Humboldt, Walter Scott and Rafaello Sabatini. The most prominent and influential were Lord Byron, who would later write Lovely girl of Cadix, Victor Hugo, who would later publish Orientales, and above all Washington Irving, with his Tales of the Alhambra. From literature, the trend spread to music. Don Carlos has already been mentioned, but Verdi also wrote Il trovatore and Ernani, the latter based on a work by Victor Hugo; to these can be added Egmont and Fidelio by Beethoven, the former based on a work by Goethe. But the best known is undoubtedly Carmen by Bizet, based on a work by Mérimée.

The Black Legend in Hispanic America

The tensions between the upper classes of criollos and peninsulares, that is, Spaniards coming from the Iberian Peninsula, predate the independence of the Hispanic American countries. It was a confrontation over the exploitation of the wealth of the American lands and peoples and, in general, did not affect the lower classes. By 1800 the ideas of the French Enlightenment, with its anticlericalism, its skepticism and its Masonic lodges, had been enthusiastically embraced by the American pro-independence movements. These ideas were mixed with the Black Legend, that is, with the identification of Spain as a "horrible example" of obscurantism and backwardness, as an enemy of modernity.

With this background, the rebels were able to use the Black Legend as a propaganda weapon against the metropolis. Countless manifestos and proclamations were published describing the depraved nature of the "Spaniards", letters and pamphlets designed to advance the pro-independence cause.

One of the first propaganda pamphlets was attributed to Juan Pablo Vizcardo y Guzmán, whose Carta dirigida a los españoles americanos por uno de sus compatriotas (Letter Addressed to the Spanish Americans by One of Their Compatriots), written in French (a language that neither Vizcardo nor most of his "compatriots" spoke) and printed en masse in London for distribution throughout Hispanic America, described the situation in America as one of "ingratitude, injustice, servitude and desolation".

Another example is that of Simón Bolívar, also financed with British capital, and an admirer of Las Casas, whose texts he would use profusely, who blamed the peninsular Spaniards for all the sins committed in America (by criollos and non-criollos) over the previous 200 years, to the point of declaring the War to the Death on them, turning the criollos into the "colonized" victims. He would also be one of the first to invoke the theft of American wealth and demand its return, although, ironically, it was he himself who contributed to the immense plundering of the Hispanic American estates, whose funds ended up in English hands.

The murals of Rivera have been pointed out by Powell as an expression of the Black Legend in America.

This anti-Spanish mentality persisted during the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth among the liberal elites, who considered "de-Hispanization" the solution to national problems. The historian Powell states that, as a consequence of denigrating Spanish culture, they ended up denigrating their own, of which the former is a part, both in their own eyes and in those of foreigners. Furthermore, this would have produced a certain rootlessness among the American peoples, by rejecting part of their own roots.

For her part, the historian and former professor at Harvard University, Elvira Roca Barea, maintains that the anti-Spanish Black Legend, as a manifestation of Hispanophobia, remains fully in force in the twenty-first century throughout Hispanic America, as it was during the two previous centuries.

Some authors have even sought to see consequences of the Black Legend in Hispanic American cultural phenomena of recent decades, such as certain ideas and currents of indigenism, or the reaction against Spanish investments in Argentina, above all in the years 2000-2002, as Español Bouché has pointed out.

This is no laughing matter. Quite the contrary. The matter is very serious. The Aerolíneas conflict threatens to turn the Argentine population against all the Spanish companies that do business in that Latin American country [...] The calls for rebellion against the invader do not fall on deaf ears. [...] There is a great difference between saving Aerolíneas and expelling the Spaniards. But for a large part of the population of the Latin American country it has not taken much effort to travel that road [...]

— Rafael Alba, Guillermo Pisani and Gema Velasco, «El calvario de los inversores extranjeros en Latinoamérica», El Economísta, no. 5713, 16-22 June 2001

For his part, Javier Noya, in his study La nueva imagen de España en América Latina (2009), cites a book written by two Argentine journalists, Cecchini and Zicolillo, at the end of the 1990s, which enjoyed wide circulation:

Just as the first Spanish conquistadors arrived at the Río de la Plata armed to the teeth, ready to keep the gold and silver of those lands, leaving the indigenous people in exchange a handful of little mirrors, bells and glass beads, the new conquistadors (the Spanish companies) landed a few years ago in Argentina to keep the jewels of its crown (its telephone and electricity networks, its oil fields, its flag-carrier airline [...] and, while they were at it, the bank savings of its citizens), giving very little in exchange, and almost all of it in the form of bribes to the most unscrupulous members of its very unscrupulous ruling class, in perfect conjunction with the leading Spanish politicians [...]

— Daniel Cecchini and Jorge Cicolillo, «Los Nuevos Conquistadores. Cómo las Empresas Españolas expoliaron Argentina»

During the subsequent financial crisis in Argentina, graffiti with the slogan "gallegos chorros" (Spanish thieves) could be seen throughout the country, so that, according to Noya, "this view of the Argentine journalists, unfortunately, was not the eccentricity of a few visionaries or opportunists [...]"

The Black Legend in unified Italy

After the Unification of Italy, many Italian historians tended to narrate in a negative way the period in which part of the Italian peninsula had been part of Spain. In particular, Gabriele Pepe denounced what in his eyes had been the plundering and corruption of southern Italy "under the Spaniards". This view only began to change in the last third of the twentieth century, thanks to a series of international congresses and to authors such as Rosario Villari and Elena Fasano Guarini.

The Black Legend in Spain

The "españolada", as Francisco Ayala called it, stemming from the European "Yellow Legend", soon took hold in nineteenth-century Spanish Romanticism. This typical and stereotyped folklorism can be found in works such as Romances históricos by the Duke of Rivas or Don Juan by Zorrilla.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century a school of liberal historians appeared in Spain and France who began to speak of Spanish decline, holding the Inquisition responsible for this economic and cultural decline and for all the ills afflicting the country. Other European historians would later take up the subject, and this position has been maintained by some authors to the present day. The reasoning held that the expulsion of the Jews and the persecution of the converts had led to the impoverishment and decline of Spain, as well as to the destruction of the middle class. These are the kind of authors that would make Menéndez y Pelayo exclaim:

Why was there no industry in Spain? Because of the Inquisition. Why are we Spaniards idle? Because of the Inquisition. Why do Spaniards take a siesta? Because of the Inquisition. Why are there bullfights in Spain? Because of the Inquisition.

— La ciencia española, Madrid, 1953, p. 102.

In 1867 Joaquín Costa had also raised the question of Spanish decline. Both he and Lucas Mallada wondered whether it was due to the Spanish character. They were joined by French and Italian sociologists, anthropologists and criminologists, who spoke more of "degeneration" than of decline, and later by other Spaniards such as Rafael Salillas or Ángel Pulido. Pompeu Gener attributed Spanish decline to religious intolerance and Juan Valera to Spanish pride. These ideas passed into literature with the Generation of '98, in texts by Pío Baroja, Azorín or Antonio Machado: "[Castile...] a piece of the planet across which wanders the shadow of Cain"; reaching in some extremes masochism and an inferiority complex. Joseph Pérez relates this rejection of one part of their own history (the expulsion of the Jews, the Inquisition, the conquest of America) and the idealization of another (Al-Andalus) to similar movements in Portugal and France.

The Black Legend in the United States

Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629. In the center an indigenous man can be seen saying "Come over and help us". The text was meant to suggest that the Indians needed the help of the English.

The Black Legend arrived in the United States with the first Puritan colonists, who saw themselves as the Protestant vanguard that would free the Indians from Spanish oppression and cruelty. One of the noisiest authors was Cotton Mather, who translated the Bible into Spanish to distribute it among the Indians of New Spain.

Propaganda in the Spanish–American War

Main article: Propaganda in the Spanish–American War

After their independence, the United States soon became a territorial rival of Spain in America, both on the border with New Spain and in Florida, the Mississippi or New Orleans, a port the Americans wanted as an outlet for their western products. The Enlightenment and liberal ideas that had entered the United States in the eighteenth century combined with their sympathy for the new republics emerging to the south, increasing anti-Spanish sentiment. This sentiment reached its peak during the Spanish–American War, when the propaganda machine of Hearst and Pulitzer, who used their newspaper empires for this purpose, had an enormous influence on public opinion in their country. The speeches heard in Congress during the conflict were so insulting that they provoked massive protest demonstrations in Spain.

American propaganda also made great efforts to make people believe that they had gone to the Philippines altruistically to liberate, civilize, educate and Christianize a people of semi-savages who, owing to their educational deficiencies, were incapable of governing themselves and needed the United States to do it for them. A people that, ironically, already had much higher levels of education (thanks to the public education system established by Spain decades earlier) than those of the people who were supposedly coming to "educate" them, something that was especially true among the troops who fought in both the Spanish–American and Philippine–American wars, since most American soldiers generally came from humble social backgrounds.

After the Spanish–American War, the United States saw itself as a great power, which had even managed to stand up successfully to Great Britain in 1895, during the border conflict with Venezuela over Guayana Esequiba. The attitude of Theodore Roosevelt in the case of Panama, his contempt for the Colombians, whom he called "bandits of Bogotá", illustrates the attitude that the American ruling classes would take toward Hispanic American culture and governments, which were considered "inferior", an attitude that Powell relates to the Black Legend, and which helps justify the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine, which "may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power".

Chronic wrongdoing [Latin American ...] may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to exercise of an international police power.

— Theodore Roosevelt, Message of the President of the United States communicated to the two houses of Congress at the beginning of the third session of the Fifty-eighth Congress (1904)

The Black Legend in the United States in the twentieth century

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the popular view of Spain and the Spaniards, accepted and even propagated by the intelligentsia, was the following:

1. The Spaniards are exceptionally cruel, as Las Casas and the war in Cuba would demonstrate.
2. The Spaniards are exceptionally treacherous, and Philip II and the sinking of the Maine were pointed to as proof.
3. The Spaniards are exceptionally intolerant, as their strong Catholicism and the Inquisition would make clear.
4. Divine providence had punished the Spaniards with their decline, their loss of power and of their rich empire.
5. The Hispanics of America, despite being suspiciously Catholic and Spanish, had to be helped (by force if necessary) to attain civilization.
6. The Indians of America were "good savages" who had been mistreated and murdered by the Spaniards. Naturally, no comparison with the Indians of North America was considered possible.

During and after the Spanish Civil War, the Black Legend had a certain echo among critics of the Franco regime, communists and anti-Catholics, although the main component of the criticism was anti-fascist in character. Enrique Moradiellos gives an example of how, during the Civil War, thinking derived from the Black Legend still shaped the view of Spain, taking a 1938 report by Major Edmond Mahony, British military attaché in Spain:

The Spaniard is not a man guided by reason, nor does he value wisdom if it advises something that goes against what his instincts dictate. Being, as he is, completely a slave to his passions, in the present circumstances we can expect him to prolong his resistance to the utmost limit of human capacity. [...] Civil war is part of the national tradition; like the bullfight, it provides a gratifying dividend in the form of emotional excitement. For this reason, the prospect of an indefinite prolongation of the civil war probably causes less consternation among the troops and in Spain in general than it arouses abroad.

— Edmond Mahony, Report to the British Government (1938)

The historian Powell presents a literary review of The House of Bernarda Alba as an example of the good health of the Black Legend in 1960:

[...] The eternal jailhood which is the normal state of Spanish women from birth until death [...] Passion in Spain is nurtured on deprivation and that fans the flames to a degree almost inconceivable to the resto of us [...] And there you have all the elements of Spain — today, yesterday, and always — death, poverty, heat, pride, cruelty and passion [...]

— John Crosby, International Herald Tribune (Paris), 14 June 1960

Anti-Hispanic (American) sentiment and anti-American sentiment

During the nineteenth century these anti-Spanish antipathies in the United States turned against Mexico, as a consequence of the war of Texas independence and its subsequent annexation to the United States. The Anglo-Saxons characterized Hispanic Americans as heirs of Catholic Spain and spread a racist narrative in which the darker skin color of Mexicans was evidence of a supposed "degeneration through mixing with Indians and Blacks".

More recently, the increase in Latin American (and above all Mexican) immigration to the United States has given rise to movements such as English only and the Minuteman Project, whose "anti-Hispanic" rhetoric follows the line of the Black Legend. In that context, the prejudices about the "lazy Spaniard" have reappeared, applied to Latin Americans, portraying them as dependent on State aid, taking jobs and benefits from others, inclined to criminality and alien to "American values".

The American stance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in turn generated a significant movement of opinion opposed to the United States (anti-Americanism) among the intellectual elites of Latin America, which did not replace anti-Spanish sentiment, but joined it. This parallel between the Black Legend and anti-Americanism, which is not limited to Hispanic America, has been expressed by William S. Maltby as follows:

In more ways than one, the position of the United States in the twentieth century approximates that of Spain in the sixteenth. Wielding enormous power in the defense of an essentially conservative ideal, it finds itself object of hatred and jealousy to friends and foes alike. No one who reads the newspaper can doubt that a new Black Legend is being assembled by the nations of the world, or that America is the intended victim. Like Spain, it has indulged its passion for self-criticism to the fullest; and in the end, its fate may be the same.

— William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England (1969)

The Black Legend in the contemporary world

The presence of the Black Legend in the school textbooks of the education systems of various countries has been pointed out by several historians. Powell mentions the report of the American Council on Education produced in 1944, which already pointed out gross errors in the educational texts of the United States, including university texts. According to the study, the books tended not only to include aspects of the Black Legend, but to generalize them to all of Hispanic America and to all Hispanic Americans. Another common feature was the reduction of Hispanic American history to two specific periods: the conquest and the independence of the Hispanic countries, as if nothing had happened in the 300 years between one event and the other, or since then; or the simplification of Hispanic American society as a white elite oppressing an Indian majority, completely ignoring the existence of a middle class. Powell studied some educational texts in 1971 and reached the same conclusion. The English case is similar; in 1992 John L. Robinson stated:

Students entering British universities share an exposure to a pernicious anti-Hispanic bias, one perhaps shared by their culture in general but certainly more specifically by the historical literature recommended to them during the years of preparation for advanced schooling.

— John L. Robinson, «The anti-hispanic bias in british historiography» (1992)

The same can be said of the school textbooks of the other countries of Europe and America, studied by Jesús Troncoso García in 2001.

Contempt for, ignorance of, or biased representation of Spanish culture and Hispanic culture is a consequence that has already been mentioned above at various points. Modern examples can be seen in cinema, both Hollywood and European, in which Hispanics continue to play the "bad guys", as has been studied in the case of the actor Sergi López, or in the plots of films such as Bite the Bullet (1975), Amistad (1997), The Mask of Zorro (1998) or Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), where the representation of Spanish culture borders on the grotesque. In 1979, the deputy director of Televisión Española, Eduardo Autrán, admitted having suppressed the episode on the Spanish Golden Age from the animated series Once Upon a Time... Man for "dwelling on the historical commonplaces of the Black Legend about Spain". The response of Albert Barillé, screenwriter and creator of the series, was that it was a problem "of sensitivity, of culture" and that the Spaniards were "very touchy". Another example is presented by Judith Etzion, who states that the marginal position of Spanish music in Western musicological historiography is based on a general lack of interest in the country's culture, for which the Black Legend would be to blame.

In politics, Español Bouché gives an example of the use of the Black Legend in 1995 during the so-called "Turbot War", a fishing dispute between Canada and Spain. Even though it was Canada that violated international law by detaining a fishing vessel in international waters, there was a violent press campaign against Spain, encouraged above all by the British tabloid press, The Sun and the Daily Mail, which asked its readers to imitate the pirate Francis Drake "who finished off the Spanish armada in 1588". The incident is considered crucial in the revival of Canadian patriotism. In the English case, it seems that the Black Legend is an easy resource used by the government in the event of domestic problems, which guarantees it the support of public opinion. Álvaro Delgado-Gal has even sought to see traces of the Black Legend in the press coverage of the Spanish recession in 2010.

The journalist José Luis Barbería has analyzed the economic consequences of the Black Legend in his study El valor de la 'marca' España, comparing the value of the "brand" with others in its environment, such as "Italy" or "France". A study by the Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales y Estratégicos expresses it as follows:

The study also reveals an interesting contrast by geopolitical areas that must be taken very much into consideration when approaching an image policy (or better, policies, in the plural). In many important countries, including the United States, there is simply no image of Spain. In other cases, as in much of Europe, the romantic stereotypes of the past continue to weigh more than the new realities: for example, there is still a perception of Spanish products and technology that does not correspond to their objective quality.

— Emilio Lamo de Espinosa, «Prólogo», in Javier Noya, La imagen de España en el Exterior (2002)

The Spanish reaction and the pink legend

Several historians and researchers link the anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic Black Legend with its counterpart, the "white legend" (Gibson), "pink legend" (García Cárcel) or "golden legend" (Blasco Ibáñez, Juderías), which propagandized the conquests of Catholic Spain. Hendrik Henrichs explains this point of view in the Revista de Occidente as follows:

Powerful nations tend to forge an image of themselves which, in most cases, is based on a myth of origin and a mission in the world. The propagation of this self-image often provokes counter-images among the adversaries of those powerful nations. In this exchange of internal and external images related to the identity and international importance of a given nation, lapidary phrases are coined that remain engraved in the international memory [...] Spain, the first European power to acquire a world empire, is also the first example in modern history of this tension between self-image and the opposing international image. Put simply, one could say that the image Spain had of itself coincided for a long time with the so-called White Legend. The counter-image put forward by Spain's adversaries is known as the Black Legend. Although these terms date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the set of self-images and counter-images that they represent is older.

— Hendrik Henrichs, "Un holandés "distinto": Johan Brouwer y la historia de España" (2006)

As already seen in the critical interpretations, García Cárcel denies the existence of the Black Legend, giving as his reason the existence of a pink legend that would act as a counterweight, which would ultimately turn the legend "gray" rather than "black". This reasoning has been criticized by Español Bouché, since the existence of a "pink legend" does not necessarily imply that it had the same influence and weight as the "black" one, above all internationally.

Among the authors who defended Spain from abroad, one can mention in France Mathieu de Magnes, Abbot of St. Germain, and Jansenius, in his Mars gallicus; both consider every war against Spain to be impious. Philip II even had admirers in France, but there was no propaganda workshop to defend Spanish interests in the country. In Portugal it was Damião de Gois who defended Spain from the attacks of Fugger and Munster. From England, Thomas Stapleton published in 1592 Apologia pro Philippo II, contra varias et falsas acusationes Elisabethae Anglial Reginae, and the Jesuit Father Gerard wrote Martyrs of the English Inquisition, which had to wait until 1984 to be published; to these may be added the writings of Antonio Sherley. The apologies for Spain came above all from the Low Countries and Italy, where Francisco Zypeo, Jacobo Chiflerio, Giovanni Botero and Campanella stood out, the latter a Calabrian Dominican who wrote Monarchia Hispanica (Hispanic Monarchy), but who would change his mind after spending twelve years in the prison of Naples, ending up as an agent of Richelieu.

Naturally, the greatest number of apologies came from Spain, where they were mixed with praise of the monarchy. The list of the latter is endless, including almost all the intellectuals of the 16th century. From the exaltation of the kings there was soon a shift to an "essentialist narcissism", which centers the Hispanic essence on religiosity and militarism. Arias Montano, Baltasar de Ayala, Cerdán de Tallada and Valle de la Cerda defended the actions of Philip II in Flanders, and Ribadeneyra supported the venture of the Invincible Armada. The consciousness of superiority and xenophobia grew from the end of the 16th century. The consciousness of a "Spanish nation" was also born, together with the Spanish linguistic identity with Castilian, as Nebrija and countless other intellectuals assumed. One of the most passionate eulogies of Hispanic culture is the Apologia de Adeserenda hispanorum eruditione seu de viris hispaniae doctis enarratio, published in 1553 by Alfonso García de Matamoros. One of the first books written specifically against the Spanish Black Legend is the Apuntamientos y anotaciones sobre la historia de Paulo Jovio (1567), usually called El Antijovio, by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a response to the Historiarum sui temporis ab a. 1494 ad a. 1547 libri XLV. of Paolo Giovio.

Above all the nations counted, and above all the others that are scattered throughout the world, the Italians hold this particular hatred against Spain that we have spoken of.

— Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, El Antijovio (1567)

In the 17th century this kind of literature increased notably, as shown by the writings of Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo; Benito Peñalosa y Mondragón, in his Libro de las cinco excelencias del español, que despueblan a España para su mayor potencia y dilatación (1629); or Juan Caramuel, in his Declaración mística de las Armas de España ínclitamente belicosas (1636). Above all, the texts of Saavedra Fajardo, Gracián and Quevedo stand out during the controversy with France. In his defense of Spain, Quevedo is the author of Carta al muy cristianísimo Luis XIII, El Lince de Italia o zahorí español and España defendida y los tiempos de ahora con los novelones sediciosos, one of the first works complaining about foreign ill will and about the decline of the country.

Oh unfortunate Spain! A thousand times have I turned over in my memory your antiquities and annals, and I have not found the cause for which you should deserve so stubborn a persecution! Only when I see that you are the mother of such sons does it seem to me that they, because you raised them, and foreigners, because they see that you tolerate them, are right to speak ill of you. [...] It is not enough for us to be so abhorred in all nations that the whole world is a prison, punishment and pilgrimage for us, while our Spain is an equal homeland and lodging for all [...].

— Quevedo, España defendida (1609)

During the 18th century Spanish intellectuals responded belligerently to the criticisms arriving from France. For example, José Cadalso answered Montesquieu in 1782 in Los eruditos a la violeta and in his Cartas marruecas; Juan Francisco Masdeu, Rodríguez Mohedano and Luis José Velázquez, who coined the expression "Golden Age" (Siglo de Oro), were others. But above all, Morvilliers and his "What does one owe to Spain?" raised hackles and generated strong responses, including one from the Count of Aranda, Ambassador to France. Others include Cavanilles (Observations sur l'article Espagne, 1784), Carlo Denina, an Italian cleric, and Forner (Oración apologética por la España y su mérito literario, 1786), who in turn was criticized by Borrego and Iriarte. The Napoleonic Invasion of Spain produced a nationalist explosion, and the criticisms of the French invader became radicalized. Among these authors, Antonio de Capmany and Manuel Gómez Imaz stand out.

The controversy over Regenerationism

Fight with Cudgels, by Goya, an iconic reference for the Two Spains, which the Aragonese painter portrays amid the pains of their birth.

Around 1875 the controversy over Spanish science broke out. While liberal intellectuals such as Núñez de Arce, Manuel de la Revilla and Gumersindo de Azcárate accused the Inquisition and the Catholic Church of being responsible for Spanish decline, a young Menéndez Pelayo came out in defense of the "essence of Spain", with texts such as "Mr. Masson redivivo" and "Mr. Masson redimuerto", in which he argued that religion had had nothing to do with it, and asserted that it had been necessary to guarantee the security of the State and to avoid the wars of religion that had devastated the rest of Europe. Pérez links this division of opinions at the end of the 19th century with similar processes in the rest of Europe, such as the German Kulturkampf, regardless of whether or not the discussion in Spain had overtones of the Black Legend.

Toward the end of the 19th century, a sense of inferiority with respect to Europe spread among Spaniards. The reaction to the perception of decline can be divided into three main groups:

• Spain and the Latin countries would represent an original civilization, more individualistic, passionate and imaginative, which, although lacking technical and scientific progress, should not be considered inferior to the others. Its greatest representative is Unamuno, characterized in his famous "¡Que inventen ellos!" ("Let them invent!"). In 1911, on the tomb of Joaquín Costa, Unamuno denies that the regenerationist leader had been a Europeanizer; rather, he was a great African, or Celtiberian, whom they placed under the banner of Europeanization, but who did nothing more than popularize the word.

It is useless to go around in circles: our gift is above all a literary gift, and everything here, even philosophy, turns into literature... and if we have any Spanish metaphysics, it is mysticism... Is this bad, is it good? For now I do not decide; I only say that it is so. ... and since there is, and must be, a division of spiritual labor just as of bodily labor, among peoples as among individuals, this task has fallen to us... in Switzerland great sailors cannot develop... Germany, for example, gives us Kant, and we give it Cervantes. We do more than enough in trying to learn what is theirs, for their science and their metaphysics will fertilize our literature, and would that our literature might become such that it fertilizes their science and their metaphysics. And here is the meaning of my exclamation, somewhat paradoxical, I admit, "let them invent!", an exclamation at which some hasty fellow, whose gift is that of not wanting to understand or of pretending not to understand, so pretends to be indignant.

— 

• A second group blamed the Inquisition, intolerance, the Counter-Reformation and the Habsburgs for the decline. Among them were the regenerationists, the Krausists and the Republicans of 1931. Their solution was secularization, the study of the sciences and the promotion of technology, democratization and liberalization. Ramón y Cajal looked to the Japanese model for emerging from decline through science and technology, a tendency followed by Maeztu and Azorín.
• Finally, the so-called Neo-Catholics asserted that it was Europe that had strayed from the right path because of the Protestant Reformation, which had led it away from the spiritual unity of Christendom through religious indifference. This line of thought would lead to the National Catholicism of the Francoist dictatorship, its most consummate expression.

Julián Marías divided the Spaniards "affected" by the Black Legend into two groups:

• the "infected", who are those who believe in the truthfulness of the Black Legend;
• the "indignant", who reject the concept as defamation, completely and without nuance.

There would be a third, minority group, the "free", those who have "remained open to the truth", who would be found between the two previous groups, not falling into the game of the Black Legend, but without responding with closed-mindedness and ignorance.

The reaction against the Anglo-Saxon claim to first place among the civilized nations came initially from France and Latin America. Nordomanía was criticized as a synonym for materialism, plutocracy and imperialism, on the basis of a conservative and even reactionary ideology. Similarly, Ángel Ganivet announced the concept of "Hispanidad", a community based on common cultural and spiritual values. That ideology was expanded by Ramiro de Maeztu, above all in his Defensa de la Hispanidad (1934), in which he speaks of the Hispanic countries as a great reserve of spiritual resources for Humanity. Among the non-conservatives who followed this path, one may mention the historian Rafael Altamira, for whom the basis of the Hispanic community was not the Gospel, but the techniques, legislation, institutions, and artistic and cultural forms brought to the New World.

Creation of the expression

It was in this atmosphere that the expression "black legend" was created to express the concept, although its first use is to be found in France, in 1893, to refer to the "black legend of Napoleon". But Emilia Pardo Bazán and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez were the first authors to give the expression the meaning that Juderías elaborated on.

There is no doubt that Juderías is the great disseminator of the formula and the concept of 'black legend', but he is neither its inventor nor did he claim to be. The expression 'black legend' is an evident counterpoint to 'golden legend', and the latter is at least as old as the 13th-century classic by Jacobus de Voragine, the Legenda Aurea Sanctorum. It is therefore likely that examples of the formula 'black legend' prior to the 20th century exist in Latin, in Spanish or in other modern languages. We have been able to find some examples of Spanish authors who used the expression before Juderías, such as Emilia Pardo Bazán and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez in the framework of their respective lectures in Paris (1899) and Buenos Aires (1909).

— Luis Español Bouché,

and he provides literal quotations, first from Pardo Bazán's lecture,

I have the right to affirm that the Spanish counter-legend, the black legend, spread by that disgusting yellow press, the stain and ignominy of civilization in the United States, is a thousand times more mendacious than the golden legend. The latter, at least, is rooted in tradition and in history; it is excused and grounded by our incredible exploits of other times; on the contrary, the black legend falsifies our character, ignores our psychology and replaces our contemporary history with a novel, in the Ponson du Terrail genre, with mines and countermines, which does not even merit the honor of analysis.

— Emilia Pardo Bazán,

and then from that of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez,

I will set out before you, grandchildren of Spain, if not her children, blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh, nerve of her nerve, what the mother country was and will be. I wish to speak to you of the black legend of Spain, which arose as a consequence of false opinions poured out over several centuries of anti-patriotic propaganda; of the magnificent epic unfolded during the seven centuries of the reconquest, which made our homeland a seething mixture of races and prepared the advent of the other epic: that of the discovery of the New World. [...] Let us now enter the subject of the lecture, which, as I said before, is entitled "The black legend of Spain", a somewhat vague title, which might seem to refer to everything in our past that concerns the intolerance that existed in religious matters. That is not so, however. There are two legends about Spain: the golden legend and the black legend.

— Vicente Blasco Ibáñez,

The brown and blue legends

The concept of the "black legend" has been put at the service of other systems of propaganda on various occasions, above all by anti-liberal authors. As early as 1923, José Conte used it to discredit the Cortes of Cádiz. Español Bouché points out that this is perhaps one of the reasons why the concept is valued so little.

The most evident case of abuse of the concept is the use made of it by the government of Franco, which rejected any criticism of the regime by appealing to the Spanish Black Legend and to the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. The ideas of Juderías, by way of Maeztu, reached Antonio Vallejo Nájera, who manipulated them in developing his concept of "race", based on cultural rather than genetic characteristics, which he imprinted on his idea of Hispanidad. Español Bouché has called this thinking, characteristic of Francoist propaganda between 1936 and 1945, the "blue legend" when of Falangist character, and the "brown legend" when of pro-Nazi character. José María de Areilza himself, an important leading figure of the Francoist regime, wrote the prologue to the 1954 edition of Juderías's work.

An example of this type of discourse is found in the Jesuit Eguía:

The door having thus been opened to true common civilization with the union and exaltation of all races, it became possible for Catholic Spain and her captains and missionaries, acting in concert, to bring the aborigines into social life, banishing their barbarism, turning their customs into human ones and imparting to them so many and such necessary things as were brought to them from the other hemisphere. It then became possible to teach them the true culture of the land, to build houses, to gather in towns, to read and write, and many other arts to which they had previously been entirely strangers.

— Constancio Eguia Ruíz, España y sus misiones en los países del Plata (1953)

Modern historiography

The European side of the legend

Romantic-liberal historiography extended into the 20th century through works critical of the Inquisition, above all those of the German Schäfer (1902) and the American Henry Charles Lea. The Jewish historians of the turn of the century, Kauffmann, Gratz and Loeb, would also follow this current, which was continued by those active in the 1930s and 1940s, above all Braunstein, Roth and Baer, who compared the destruction of the Holocaust with the Inquisition.

But little by little ideological belligerence diminished in Europe, and scientific solidity was gained. Works on Philip II placed the Monarch in his historical context, those of Pfandl (1938) and Walsh (1943) being especially apologetic, in parallel with what Fernández Montaña (1914) and Fernández de Retana (1958) had done in Spain, against which historians such as Merriman (1934) and Cadoux (1947) would set themselves. Hispanism became more conservative, and the liberal current also evolved considerably in its premises during the first decades of the century, with socioeconomic studies being strengthened. Benedetto Croce broke with the cliché of Spain's despotic domination of Italy, in which many other Italian authors would concur. But above all it was French historiography that broke definitively with the clichés of the legend, the work of Lucien Febvre standing out.

The Civil War produced a polarization of historiography. In the conservative camp, various historians published belligerent texts in defense of Spanish historical figures, of the Inquisition, of the Austrias, of Spain's work in America or of the Spanish character. In the liberal camp, Marcel Bataillon brought about a radical shift with his work Erasmo y España, which for the first time highlighted the existence of progressive thought in 16th-century Spain, despite the opposition of literary historians such as Kemplerer, who refused to recognize a Spanish Renaissance or Enlightenment.

In the 1960s various works were published that, for the first time abroad, studied various aspects of the Black Legend in detail. Thus, in 1960, Sverker Arnoldsson, professor at the University of Gothenburg, published La Leyenda Negra. Estudios sobre sus orígenes, which delves into the Italian and German origins of the legend. In 1965 Henry Kamen published The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, which contributed enormously to demystifying the Spanish Inquisition. Three years later, in 1968, William S. Maltby studied the Black Legend in England in depth in his The Black Legend in England. At the beginning of the following decade, in 1971, two important general revisions appeared in English: that of Philip Wayne Powell, with his Tree of Hate (El árbol del odio), which devotes a great deal of space to the legend in the United States, and The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New, edited by Charles Gibson.

From the 1980s onward, historiography on Spain underwent an important change, against the backdrop of the autonomous communities and the explosion of nationalisms, as well as the integration of Spain into the European Economic Community. Abroad, countless works were published reappraising the administration of the Austrias and its protagonists, such as the Duke of Alba, the Count-Duke of Olivares or Philip II. For these authors, the failure of the Hispanic monarchy would have lain in the burden represented by the defense of Catholicism, that is, it would have been of an ideological-political character, and not in its administrative technique, which was comparable to others of the time. Even the defeat of the Armada has been reduced to its proper limits. The study of the Inquisition has undergone a veritable explosion, above all thanks to the Center for Inquisitorial Studies and the Institute of the History of the Inquisition, which have made it possible to place inquisitorial trials on a par with others of the time, nuancing their effect on Spanish culture.

The American side of the legend

By contrast, the American side of the legend remains fertile ground for disputes, characterized by an obsessive reference to the conquest and a constant attempt to ignore the two hundred years that followed.

During the 1930s apologetic historiography dominated, the most rigorous examples being those of Silvio Zavala and Kirpatrick. The following decade saw an explosion of American historiography, which for the most part maintained the apologetic tone toward the conquest, notably the book by Rómulo D. Carbia, who considered the Black Legend a "baseless monstrosity", and the report of the American Council on Education. During these years Frank Tannenbaum published his work Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (1946), in which he argued that the model of slavery in Ibero-America had been much more humane than in the north, starting a controversy that continues to this day. The conservative offensive continued during the 1950s with historians such as Vicente Serra, Rosemblat, Lohmann and Chevalier. During the 1940s there also emerged what has been called the "historiography of the anti-conquest", which in Latin America took the form of indigenist militancy, as was the case of Luis E. Valcárcel in Peru or Alfonso Caso in Mexico. During the 1960s, Miguel León-Portilla gave birth to the "vision of the vanquished", which would give rise to one of the most critical currents in the historiography of the conquest and colonization.

One of the most notable historiographical disputes was between Benjamin Keen and Lewis Hanke, who between 1969 and 1971 developed their points of view in the pages of the journal Hispanic American Historical Review. Keen defended the truthfulness of Las Casas's claims by showing the traumatic changes undergone by the Indian population. Hanke, on the other hand, warned of the Dominican's excessive generalizations and pointed to the enormous legislative effort of the Crown to protect the Indians, including harsh punishments for offenders.

The hypercritical view of the conquest of America intensified during the decade before the celebrations of the Fifth Centenary. The most acerbic criticisms came above all from indigenism, to the point that in September 1986 the 41st General Assembly of the UN decided to remove the celebration of the Fifth Centenary from the agenda. The criticisms focused on the demographic catastrophe ("genocide"); the bloodiest aspects of the conquest were emphasized, while Spanish victories were minimized, being attributed to chance or to indigenous weakness. Special emphasis was also placed on linking the colonial legacy with negative patterns of behavior in modern America: caciquismo, military interference, corruption, conservative mentality and, in general, the underdevelopment of the continent, while an idyllic image of pre-Columbian America was presented, always without mentioning that it was the indigenous peoples themselves who allied with the Spaniards to defeat the military forces of other oppressive indigenous ethnic groups.

In the 1980s historiography began to attack what Fontana has called the "historiography of emancipation". A distinction has begun to be made between private and state initiative in the conquest, and the myth of the ease of the conquest has been definitively broken, the violence of the indigenous reaction having become clear. For example, Guillermo Lohmann says that "The work accomplished by Spain in America was neither a historical error nor a cultural crime, nor does it constitute a failure to be repented of". Indigenism has lost its romantic belligerence, and the historians who sought to make the metropolis the origin of all evils have been castigated. The controversy has been revived again during the celebration of the bicentennials of the independence of the Hispanic American countries.

García Cárcel considers that the creation of a third way between the two existing ones has failed, and that myths mixed with ideologies have not allowed progress toward a more dispassionate, less nationalist history of America that would allow a rapprochement between the Spanish and American peoples.

Critical interpretations

There is a group of historians who do not believe in the objective existence of the legend, but rather consider that the Black Legend is nothing more than the perception Spaniards have of their image abroad. Carmen Iglesias expresses it as follows:

The "black legend" is, so to speak, the external image of Spain as Spain perceives it [...] The black legend consists, therefore, of the negative traits—which are objectively the most often repeated—that the Spanish consciousness discovers in the image of itself.

— Carmen Iglesias,

García Cárcel even directly denies the existence of the Black Legend in his book La leyenda negra:

Neither a legend, inasmuch as the body of negative opinions about Spain had no few historical foundations, nor black, given that the tone was never constant or uniform. Grays abound, but the coloring of these opinions was always determined by the opposing colors of what we have here called the pink legend.

— García Cárcel and Mateo Bretos, La leyenda negra (1991)

Roberto Fernández Retamar, professor at the University of Havana and director of the magazine Casa de las Américas, holds that:

[...] Apparently, this Black Legend was provoked by the understandable rejection of the monstrous crimes committed on this Continent by the Spanish conquistadors. But the slightest respect for historical truth shows that this is simply false. The crimes existed, yes, and they were monstrous. But, seen from the perspective of the centuries that have passed since then, no more monstrous than those committed by the Western metropolises that enthusiastically succeeded Spain in this dreadful task and sowed death and desolation on every continent. If anything distinguishes the Spanish conquest, it is not the proportion of crimes, in which none of those nations allowed itself to be outdone, but the proportion of scruples. The conquests carried out by those countries did not lack murders or destruction either; what they did lack were men like Bartolomé de las Casas, and internal controversies such as those that the Dominicans ignited and that shook the Spanish Empire, over the legitimacy of the conquest. This does not mean that such men, always a minority, succeeded in imposing their views, but it does mean that they came to defend them before the highest authorities, and were heard and in a certain way heeded.

In the opinion of the historian and Hispanist Henry Kamen, the concept of the "black legend" ceased to exist in the Anglo-Saxon world many years ago, although it persists in Spain owing to internal Spanish political issues. During a summer course at El Escorial, before an audience composed mostly of Spanish university students who asserted that Philip II had been a tyrant whom they branded as petty, spiteful, fanatical and hypocritical, Henry Kamen replied:

[...] It is unheard of. The only ones in the whole world who still believe the Black Legend wholeheartedly are you, the Spanish university students. It embarrasses me.

Related topics

• Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition
• Historical revisionism
• Anti-Spanish sentiment
• Anti-Catholicism
• Propaganda in the Spanish–American War

Bibliography

• Alvar, Alfredo (1997). La leyenda negra (in español). Madrid: Akal. ISBN 84-460-0797-5.
• Arnoldsson, Sverker (1960). La Leyenda Negra. Estudios sobre sus orígenes (in español). Gothenburg: Göteborgs Universitets Årsskrift.
• Carbia, Rómulo D. (2004) [first edition 1943]. Historia de la leyenda negra hispano-americana (in español). Molina Martínez, Miguel (preliminary study). Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia. ISBN 84-95379-89-9.
• Español Bouché, Luis (2007). Leyendas Negras: vida y obra de Julián Juderías: la leyenda negra antiamericana (in español). Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León. ISBN 978-84-9718-444-1.
• García Cárcel, Ricardo; Mateo Bretos, Lourdes (1990). La leyenda negra (in español). Madrid: Altamira. ISBN 84-7969-013-5.
• García Cárcel, Ricardo (1997). La leyenda negra (in español). Barcelona: Altaya. ISBN 84-487-0905-5.
• Hilton, Ronald (2002). La légende noire au 18e siècle. Le monde hispanique vu du dehors (in français). Historical Text Archive. {{cite book}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
• Juderías, Julián (2003) [first edition 1914]. La Leyenda Negra (in español). Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León. ISBN 84-9718-225-1.
• Kamen, Henry (1999) [first edition 1965]. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (revised ed.). New Haven & London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07880-3.
• Maltby, William S. (1971) [first edition 1968]. The Black Legend in England. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Marías, Julián (2006) [first edition 1985]. España Inteligible. Razón Histórica de las Españas (in español). Alianza Editorial. ISBN 84-206-7725-6.
• Molina Martínez, Miguel (1991). La leyenda negra (in español). Madrid: Nerea. ISBN 84-86763-42-8.
• Moradiellos, Enrique (1998). Saz, Ismael (ed.). "Más allá de la Leyenda Negra y del Mito Romántico: el concepto de España en el hispanismo británico contemporaneísta" (PDF). Ayer (in español) (31). Asociación de Historia Contemporánea: 183–199. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 6, 2011. Retrieved February 6, 2011.
• Noya, Javier (2009). La Nueva Imagen de España en América Latina (in español). Ed. Tecnos and Real Instituto Elcano. ISBN 978-84-936-3015-7.
• Pérez, Joseph (2009). La leyenda negra (in español). Gadir. ISBN 978-84-96974-17-3.
• Peters, Edward (1989). Inquisition. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06630-8.
• Powell, Philip Wayne (1985) [first edition 1971]. Tree of Hate. Valecito, California: Ross House Books. SBN 465-08750-7.
• Powell, Philip Wayne (2008). La leyenda Negra (in español). Barcelona: Áltera. ISBN 978-84-96840-20-1.
• Roca Barea, María Elvira (2016). Imperiofobia y leyenda negra. Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y el Imperio español (in español). Madrid: Siruela. ISBN 978-84-16854233.
• Vaca de Osma, José Antonio (2004). El Imperio y la leyenda negra (in español). Madrid: Rialp. ISBN 84-321-3499-6.

External links

• ""Leyenda negra"". Proyecto Filosofía en español (in español). Retrieved June 23, 2010.
• Amago, Samuel (September 22, 2005). "Why Spaniards make good bad guys: Sergi López and the Persistence of the Black Legend in contemporary European cinema". Film Criticism. Retrieved April 26, 2010.
• Capote, Gabriel (March 14, 2008). "La Leyenda Negra y el descubrimiento de América". Capotec (Internet Archive) (in español). Archived from the original on May 21, 2008. Retrieved April 26, 2010.
• García Cárcel, Ricardo (September 4, 2007). "Leyenda negra y autocrítica". ABC (in español). Retrieved May 8, 2010.
• Grau, Abel (July 10, 2010). "Mi alma se atormenta, pueblo fiel, viendo cómo te afrenta el español cruel". El País (in español). Retrieved July 10, 2010.
• Insúa, Pedro (March 2009). "Genealogía de la leyenda negra". El Catoblepas (in español). Retrieved April 26, 2010.
• Maqueda Abreu, Consuelo (1996). "Extranjeros, Leyenda Negra e Inquisición". Revista de la Inquisición (in español). Retrieved May 15, 2010.
• Novoa Ojea, Olalla (June 23, 2010). "Entrevista a Pérez Joseph" (video). Manga Ancha (El Mundo) (in español). Retrieved September 5, 2010.
• Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de (2008/2009). "La Leyenda Negra/The Black Legend: Historical Distortion, Defamation, Slander, Libel, and Stereotyping of Hispanics". Somos Primos (104 and 105). {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
• Rojo, José Andrés (November 21, 2009). "Joseph Pérez disecciona los porqués de la 'leyenda negra'". El País (in español). Retrieved April 26, 2010.
• Rafael Núñez Huesca (October 15, 2017). "Diez extranjeros ilustres desmontan la Leyenda Negra antiespañola". La Gaceta (in español). Retrieved August 15, 2019.
• Sáenz del Castillo y Caballero, Javier. "La Leyenda Negra hispanoamericana". (Internet Archive) (in español). Retrieved April 26, 2010.
• "Documental sonoro sobre La Leyenda Negra" (audio documentary on the Black Legend) on the program 'Documentos RNE' of Radio Nacional de España.
• Diez extranjeros ilustres desmontan la Leyenda Negra antiespañola (Ten illustrious foreigners dismantle the anti-Spanish Black Legend).
• Lo que la Leyenda Negra contra España no cuenta de las Leyes de Indias (What the Black Legend against Spain does not tell about the Laws of the Indies).
• Don Marcelino y la Leyenda Negra (Don Marcelino and the Black Legend)