![]() It is the world of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, with vivid descriptions of burning heretics, ghastly engines of torture with innocent Bible-believers martyred for their faith. Protestants hated and feared the Spaniards for the bloody Catholic Counter-Reformation, Englishmen for the Armada, Dutch and Germans for decades of religious persecution, Italians and French for humiliations on the battlefield, Latin Americans for the excesses of. THE BLACK LEGEND: THE SPANISH INQUISITION Most of the myths surrounding the Inquisition have come to us wrapped in the cloak of the Spanish Inquisition. Rich and arrogant, Spain dominated Europe for two centuries and the Americas for three, making life miserable for a host of enemies who have proved to have long and unforgiving memories. THE BLACK LEGEND originated five centuries ago, when Spain was the greatest power in the West. "We want this to stop, to let people know that the conquistadors are long gone, Franco is dead, and Spain has become a modern nation." Discouering a secret Consultation, newly holden / in the. "There has been this predominant Anglo-Saxon world culture that has tended to ignore Spain, with a lot of cliches about our ruthlessness and backwardness," says Ion de la Riva, Spain's former assistant secretary of state for international cooperation. SIR VVALTER / RAVVLEIGH S / GHOST/ or/ ENGLAND S FOREWARNER. Officials in Madrid hope to be able to erase this persistently negative image once and for all, during the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas, in 1992. A diplomat formerly in the Spanish Embassy in Washington, D.C., recently prepared a report published in Spain lamenting the tenacity of anti-Spanish biases in America, and concluding, "There is not much difference between the Black Legend and racism." The diplomat listed percepciones that he believes are shared by the American people with respect to Spain and Spaniards: Anyone who has read a Zorro comic book or watched Errol Flynn and Claude Rains in The Sea Hawk cannot help noticing that Spaniards, or their leaders, seem to come in for routine vilification. La Leyenda Negra, the Black Legend, endures to this day in the stereotyping of Hispanics in Europe and the Western Hemisphere as lazy, uneducated, corrupt, and cruel. Alfred Lord Tennyson deemed them "inquisition dogs" and "children of the devil." Montaigne accused the Spanish of indiscriminate butchery as of savage beasts." England and the Netherlands, Spains imperial rivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, imagined Spain as cruel and degenerate barbarians of la leyenda. ![]() These charges were repeated and embellished over the subsequent four centuries of rivalry between the Spanish and other Western powers: the English, Dutch, Germans, Italians, French, and Americans. They accused Spain of atrocities in its conquest of the Americas, and in the conduct of the Inquisition. In the years leading up to and following the Spanish Armada, in 1588, pamphleteers from London to Wittenberg put out the word that Spaniards were an uncivilized, greedy people who reveled in bloodshed and destruction. ![]() The geographic reach and linguistic breadth of this ambitious collection will make it a valuable resource for any discussion of race, national identity, and religious belief in the European Renaissance.DURING THE sixteenth century the enemies of imperial Spain, hopelessly outgunned by its armies, struck back using words. Challenging this stereotype, Rereading the Black Legend contextualizes Spain’s uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the “Black Legend.”Ī distinguished group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration. The phrase “The Black Legend” was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. ![]()
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