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The nature of Spain and its international efforts has also been a cause of contention amongst Spaniards themselves, from Gongora's Soledades until the Generation of '98. Traditionally, the Black Legend has been used by the left and the nationalists of non-Castilian regions as a political weapon against the central government or Spanish nationalism, which the conservative parties have countered with the White Legend. To avoid causing offense the Seville Expo '92 (during a PSOE Government) celebrated the 500th aniversary of the discovery of America, as the beginning of the Age of Discovery, and not of colonization or conquest.
Elements of the Legend
Expulsion of the Jews and Muslims
The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 has often been quoted as an example of the Spaniards' religious intolerance. However, many other expulsions took place in Europe during the Middle Ages. Though the expulsion from Spain of at least 200,000 Jews was by far the largest and most significant, this can be explained by the fact that Spain had the largest Jewish community. A Brief Chronology of anti-semitism (accessed 23 Jan 2006), which in turn cites Anti-Semitism (1974) Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem ISBN 0-7065-1327-4.| Country | Date of expulsion | Comment | - | France | 1182 | Expulsion and confiscation of goods ordered by King Philip II of France | - | England | 1290 | Ordered by Edward I of England, first great expulsion of the Middle Ages | - | France | 1306, 1321/ 1322 y 1394 | Philip IV of France ordered the first one of these | - | Austria | 1421 | The expulsion took place after a persecution in which 270 Jews were burned, goods were confiscated and children were subjected to forced conversion. | - | Castile and Crown of Aragon | 1492 | Ordered by the Catholic Monarchs | - | Sicily | 1492 | Ordered by Ferdinand II of Aragon | - | Lithuania | 1495 | - | Portugal | 1496/1497 | Ordered by the king Manuel I, under pressure of the Spanish Crown. | - | Brandenburg (Germany) | 1510 | - | Tunisia | 1535 | - | Kingdom of Naples | 1541 | - | Genoa | 1550 and 1567 | - | Bavaria | 1554 | - | Papal States | 1569/1593 |
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The Spanish Inquisition and religious intolerance, Catholic Spain
- See also: Inquisition and Spanish Inquisition.
The Inquisition has always been one of the main parts of the Black Legend. Its incorporation into the legend dates from the 16th century, when it was first criticised by, amongst others, two Protestant authors: the Englishman John Foxe, a polemicist who published the Book of Martyrs in 1554, and the Spaniard Reginaldo González de Montes, author of Exposición de algunas mañas de la Santa Inquisición Española (Exposition of some methods of the Spanish Inquisition) (1567).
The legend depicts the Spanish Inquisition as cruel and bloodthirsty. The image of moats, chains, cries and rooms of torture is inseparably attached to it. Thousands of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and anyone who had fallen from favour would then have been cruelly tortured and finally murdered in the dungeons of a Catholic institution by Dominican friars.
The Inquisition already existed in many European countries before it was established in Spain in 1480. It appeared in 1184, and torture was first used in 1252. That was a usual method in the medieval legal system, but its application was much more violent in the secular justice. In contrast to most witch-hunts and other medieval processes, the accused had the right to a lawyer and a trial. However, like in many medieval -and non-medieval- institutions, rules were not always followed to the letter, and it has come to public knowledge that the Pope was obliged to reproach the inquisitors several times for being "excessively zealous".
European colonization of the Americas
Origin
From the 13th century, the Crown of Aragon dominated Naples and Sicily, laying the grounds for a hatred of Catalans. The Valencian pope Alexander VI became an almost mythical villain, and countless legends and traditions attached to his name. Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere called Valencian Pope Alexander VI "Catalan, marrano and circumcised". According to Sverker Arnoldsson, the Italians' criticisms of the Spaniards were cultural and racial, not only economic and political: "age-long mixture of Spanish with Oriental and African elements, plus the Jewish and Islamic influence upon Spanish culture; this motivated the view of the Spaniards as a people of inferior race and doubtful orthodoxy."
The classic sources
Exaggerated and lurid accounts of the Roman Catholic Inquisition in Spain were, in the 16th century (a time of great Protestant-Catholic strife) and still today, principal sources for the anti-Spanish Black Legend. The Inquisition had existed in many European countries before it came to Spain. It had existed in the Kingdom of Aragon for some two centuries but not in Castile until the year 1480 when the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, approved its establishment throughout Spain with the converso and Dominican friar, Tomás de Torquemada, as its first Inquisitor General, primarily to investigate and punish Judaizing conversos, Jews who had converted to Roman Catholicism but had continued practising their religion in secret.
Some of the strongest and earliest support for the Legend came from two Protestants: the Englishman John Foxe, author of the Book of Martyrs (1554), and the Spaniard Reginaldo González de Montes, author of the Exposición de algunas mañas de la Santa Inquisición Española (Exposition of some vices of the Spanish Inquisition, 1567). Another early source from which the Black Legend drew support was Girolamo Benzoni's Historia nuovo (New History), first published in Venice in 1565.
Even today major support for the Black Legend comes from the use by Spain's enemies of published self-criticism generated from within Spain itself. As early as 1511, some Spaniards criticized the legitimacy of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Then in 1552, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas published his famous Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies), a polemical account of the abuses that accompanied of the colonization of New Spain, and especially the island of Hispaniola (now home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti). In the section regarding Hispaniola, Las Casas compares the indigenous Arawaks to tame ewes and writes that when he arrived in 1508, "there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it." * The work of Las Casas was first referenced in English with the 1583 publication The Spanish Colonie, or Brief Chronicle of the Actes and Gestes of the Spaniards in the West Indies, at a time when England and Spain were preparing for war in the Netherlands. Many scholars agree that Las Casas's population figures are exaggerated.
The Duke of Alba's actions in the United Provinces contributed to the Black Legend. Sent in August 1567 to stamp out heresy and political unrest in a part of Europe where printing presses were a constant source of heterodox opinion, one of Alba's first acts was to gain control of the book industry. In a single year, several printers were banished and at least one was executed. Book sellers and printers were raided in the search for banned books, many more of which were added to the Index librorum prohibitorum. In 1576 Spanish troops attacked and pillaged Antwerp, over three terrible days that came to be known as "The Spanish Fury". The soldiers rampaged through the city, killing and looting; they demanded money from citizens and burned the homes of those who refused to (or could not) pay. Plantin's printing establishment was threatented with destruction three times but was saved each time when a ransom was paid. Antwerp was economically devastated by the attack, and Plantin's business suffered. Such facts similar to German rampages in the sack of Rome (1527) were enlarged upon to enhance the Black Legend.
Other critics of Spain included Antonio Pérez, the fallen secretary of King Philip II of Spain. Pérez fled to England, where he published attacks upon the Spanish monarchy under the title Relaciones (1594).
These books were extensively used by the Dutch during their fight for independence from Spain, and taken up by the English to justify their piracy and wars against the Spanish. Foxe's book was among Sir Francis Drake's favourites; Drake himself was and is regarded by the Spaniards as a cruel and bloodthirsty pirate. The two northern nations were not only emerging as Spain's rivals for worldwide colonialism, but were also strongholds of Protestantism while Spain was the most powerful Roman Catholic country of the period.
Comparison with Portugal
Other Roman Catholic nations, such as Portugal, have not been subjected to Black Legend-type treatment to the extent that the Spanish have been. This is so despite the fact that the Inquisition was also active in Portugal, that Portuguese Jews were also expelled, that slavery was more important in the Portuguese colonies than in the Spanish colonies, and that a number of explorers and rulers who used violent means, such as Afonso de Albuquerque and Mem de Sá, served under the Portuguese flag. Perhaps the long strategic alliance between England and Portugal explains why these events and practices were not seen through the same lens as similar matters in Spain.
The Enlightenment
Guillaume Thomas François Raynal published in 1770 his most important work, L'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (The philosophical and political history of the establishments and commerce of Europeans in the two Indies, that is to say the East Indies and the West Indies).
Also during the Enlightenment, the imprisonment and death of Don Carlos, mentioned above, inspired the blank verse play Don Carlos, Infant v. Spanien (Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, 1787), by Friedrich Schiller, and later the opera Don Carlos by Giuseppe Verdi.
Romantic travellers
In the 19th Century, many writers, such as Washington Irving, Prosper Mérimée, George Sand, and Theophile Gautier, invented a mythical Andalusia. In their writings, Spain is converted into the Orient of the Western World (Africa begins in the Pyrenees), an exotic country full of brigands, economic delays, Gypsies, ignorance, machismo, matadores, Moors, passion, political chaos, poverty and fanatical religiosity. From this literature, the figure of the Latin lover still survives. This vision had been introduced earlier by Polish Jan Potocki.
In classical music, Georges Bizet with Carmen (1875) and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov with Capriccio espagnol (1887) contributed to this theme.
Westward Ho!
Charles Kingsley's popular historical romance of 1855, Westward Ho!, draws its inspiration from the black legend: the buccaneering hero sets out from Elizabethan England to defeat the Spanish at sea and on land; the Spanish characters are vain, arrogant and cruel; the Irish too are treated with hostility.
Modern historiography
Marcel Bataillon (1895-1977) revealed the extent of Erasmus's influence in Spain in Erasme et l'Espagne (1937). Erasmus was a humanist, and the popularity of his ideas in Spain goes against the stereotype of the country as being a monolith of fanatical Catholicism.
Black Legend in the United States of America
In his book Tree of Hate, Philip Wayne Powell wrote that the United States of America inherited the Black Legend from the British colonization of the Americas. These Anglo-Saxon prejudices toward Spaniards were transferred to Mexicans in the 19th century.
The American historian William S. Maltby says in his book The Black Legend in England (1982): "As many other Americans, I had absorbed the anti-Hispanism from movies and folkloric literature much before this prejudice was contrasted from a different point of view in the works of competent historians, what was a big surprise for me; When I succeeded to know the work of the Hispanists, my curiosity had no limits. The Hispanists have always blamed the enemies of Spain for the tergiversate obscuring of the historic facts and the current worldwide prejudice against Spain."
Some people feel that the United States mass media and government have propagated the legend to justify United States actions against Spain or Latin American countries, as in the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War or the colonization of the Philippines after the Philippine-American War. They allege that there exists clear evidence of the Black Legend in modern literature, movies, and web sites, such as in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Steven Spielberg's Amistad. On the other side, the pirates of the Caribbean who used to attack defenseless Spanish merchant ships are turned into romantic and idealistic figures.
White Legend
In contrast to the Black Legend is the so-called White Legend (in Spanish, "leyenda rosa", literally "rosy" legend). Advocates of the Black Legend postulate the existence of a White Legend comparable to the Black Legend in extension, influence and persistence in time. An easily refuted straw-man White Legend is then invoked as a rhetorical device in discussions concerning the Black Legend. A White Legend with reference to the history of Spain is argued to have only been prominent during certain limited time periods such as, for example, during the Falangist regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
Proponents of the White Legend tend to excuse the Spanish Inquisition, emphasizing that in form it merely copied institutions already in place in the rest of Europe (the suppression of Catharism in France, Italy, etc.; the already existing Inquisitions elsewhere in Europe), citing the unique situation of Spain as a country recently under Muslim Moorish domination, and comparing the Inquisition favorably with French Wars of Religion, Oliver Cromwell's Cromwellian conquest of Ireland or the witch hunts in many Protestant countries.
Similarly, these advocates tend to excuse the "The Spanish Fury" or the sack of Rome, emphasizing that troops of Habsburg Spain were composed by many different European nationalities and ethnicities but under “fragile” Spanish command. They criticized the fact that Belgian, Italian or German rampages were enlarged upon and attributed to Spanish soldiers in order to enhance the anti-Spanish Black Legend.
In an opposite sense, Henry Kamen used this information to place the Spanish contribution to the Spanish Empire in its proper European context. According to his book, the Spanish Empire was a multiethnic enterprise, with a testimonial and leading role of the Spaniards and including:
- Armaments from Milan.
- Genoese and German bankers, as the Fuggers.
- Genoese (Andrea Doria), Portuguese (Magallanes, Quirós, Torres) and Venetian sailors.
- German and Italian soldiers, e.g. Ambrosio Spinola.
- English (in America and Triangular Trade) and Chinese (in the Philippines) merchants, and
- Native American allies (as in the Conquest of Aztec and Inca Empire)
Kamen is controversial and truistic - no European historical undertaking has ever been accomplished exclusively by a single nationality… or by excluding a single nationality. In that sense Kamen foresaw an early decline of European civilization pending the reintegration of Spain into its rightful place and leading role in European culture and diplomacy.
The White Legend is most notable in portraying Spain as benevolent during the conquest of the Americas. For example, in dealing with Hernán Cortés's conquest of Mexico, the White Legend emphasizes that Cortés's army consisted largely of Native American enemies (and disgruntled vassals) of the Aztec Empire and credits accounts of Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism.
Isabella of Castile (Spanish: Isabel I de Castilla) and others involved in the Spanish conquest of the Americas were more than routinely concerned for the welfare of the natives. There is no English or French equivalent of Bartolomé de las Casas, but this need not mean that the English and French were not engaging in comparable cruelties: it can reasonably be interpreted to mean simply that no one among them shared Bartolomé's concern and eloquent dissent. Spain was the first European colonial power to pass laws protecting the natives of its American colonies as early as 1542 with the Laws of the Indies (Spanish: Leyes de Indias).
As for destruction of populations and cultures, the White Legend claims that the demographics of much of Latin America today favor Spain's claims to benevolence. Today the descendants of the aboriginal Americans constitute the base of the population in many of the countries that comprised the Spanish Empire in America.
Some Amerindian languages have reached rank of co-official tongues in Latin American countries (Quechua and Aymará in both Peru and Bolivia and Guaraní in Paraguay). It is likely that Spanish priests actually spread Quechua beyond its original geographic area. This active spread of a native language by Europeans has no equivalent in the American countries which were originally colonized by other European powers, nor in Australia. However, New Zealand, where the Maori language is a comparable case of co-official status, could be regarded as one exception to this.
The White Legend plays down the Spanish role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade by emphasizing the role of the English but also that of the Dutch, French, Belgian, Portuguese and other Europeans. The defenders of this point of view argue that Spain was prohibited by the Pope from taking part in such activities, together with the fact it would be in breach of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world outside of Europe in an exclusive duopoly between the Spanish and the Portuguese, assigning Africa to Portugal.
See also
- Anti-Catholicism
- Bullfighting
- Colonial mentality
- Hispanic culture in the Philippines
- Lucrezia Borgia
- Philip II of Spain
- Population history of American indigenous peoples
- Slavery
- Spanish Armada
- Spanish colonization of the Americas
- Spanish culture
- Spanish Empire
- Spanish Inquisition
- Valladolid debate
Notes
References
- Powell, Philip Wayne, Tree Of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations With The Hispanic World. Basic Books, New York, 1971, ISBN 0465087507.
- Maltby, William S., The Black Legend in England. Duke University Press, Durham, 1971, ISBN 0822302500.
External links
- The Shadow of the Black Legend in John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia, by Eric Griffin
- [http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39d38e0d14db.htm Myth and Reality: The Legacy of Spain in America by Jesus J. Chao
- Pope's dilemma: How to confront the Inquisition, November 21, 1998 "The 'black legend' has been destroyed," said historian Carlo Ginzburg, author of several groundbreaking works on the Inquisition. "But this doesn't erase the ultimate wrongness of killing people for their ideas."
Anti-Catholicism | NPOV disputes | Spanish Inquisition | Spanish-American War | Pseudohistory
Leyenda negra | Leyenda negra española | Légende noire | Zwarte legende | Spaniens svarta legend
"Black Legend"