The dawn of the sixteenth century was a time when the various European countries began to nurture nationalism, with imperialism simply a given. Italians also hated the immoral and sensuous Borgia Pope of the time, Alexander VI, who was a Spaniard. They were also suspected of having “other Oriental elements” in their bloodline. Native Italians naturally resented their presence, considering themselves to be racially superior to the newcomers – after all, they were the heirs of the Roman Empire! It was a well-accepted belief that Spaniards were racially impure they had the blood of centuries of occupation by North Africans and Jews were known to move freely about on the Iberian peninsula during and after the Moorish occupation. Under King Ferdinand in the 1490’s Spain demolished French ambitions in that area and upper class Spaniards began to move into Italy. Spain and her immediate neighbor across the Pyrenees both had designs on conquering the Italian Peninsula. We shall see that this resentment reared its ugly head in colonial times, not just with France, but with the northern countries of the Netherlands and England, over Spain’s vast territories in the New World.ĭuring the late twelfth century, Spanish imperialism led her into the Mediterranean where she incorporated Sicily, Sardinia and Naples into her budding Empire. The Reconquista began almost immediately in the region of Asturias (for the Christians would never give up fighting for their homeland.) France always tended to look down on her southern neighbor as a kind of an extension of North Africa, which she actually was for almost eight hundred years. It took the Muslims a couple of centuries to achieve their northernmost conquest, never occupying the extreme north from Galicia on the west to Catalonia on the east, although they did achieve an incursion into southern France where they were defeated by Charles Martel in 732. It was not until Spain’s conquest by the North African Berbers and Moors beginning in 711 that Spain was virtually closed to the rest of Europe. During the Middle Ages, the two countries were the great Imperial rivals of Europe. They had been fighting border skirmishes for more than one thousand years. Let us first begin with the European scene, keeping in mind that, at the time we speak of, the various European nations as we know them today did not exist.īecause of their common border, the French-Spanish rivalry antedates that of all the other European countries.
We shall return to Fray Bartolome’s book later.
At some point the two converge because the perpetrators of the lies in Europe struck gold when they discovered his book Brevisima Relacion de la Destruccion de Las Indias (Very Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies). The Black Legend seems to have two basic sources: one in Europe, beginning in twelfth century Italy the other, much later, in the writings of the Bishop of Chiapas, Mexico, the Dominican Fray Bartolome de las Casas who had accompanied the Conquistadores to that country shortly after the discovery of the New World. Powell strongly makes the case for what he calls the “Nordic superiority complex,” giving many examples from textbooks and other writings, especially in English-speaking countries, of how these writers believe that Spaniards have shown themselves, historically, to be “uniquely cruel, bigoted, tyrannical, obscurantist, lazy, fanatical, greedy and treacherous that they differ so much from other peoples in these traits that Spaniards and Spanish history must be viewed and understood in terms not ordinarily used in describing and interpreting other peoples.” Spaniards have termed this process and the image that resulted from it as ‘The Black Legend.’ ” Here is a more recent definition by a Protestant American historian, Philip Wayne Powell, from his book Tree of Hate: “An image of Spain circulated through late sixteenth century Europe borne by means of political and religious propaganda that blackened the characters of Spaniards and their ruler to such an extent that Spain became the symbol of all forces of repression, brutality, religious and political intolerance and intellectual and artistic backwardness for the next four centuries. In order to begin to understand this complex topic, we must first settle on a working definition of the meaning of the term “Black Legend.” Let us then start with the man who coined the phrase, the Spaniard Julian Juderias, in his book, La Leyenda Negra (The Black Legend), of 1914: “(It is) The environment created by the fantastic stories about our homeland that have seen the light of publicity in all countries, the grotesque descriptions that have been made of the character of Spaniards as individuals and collectively, the denial or at least the systematic ignorance of all that is favorable and beautiful in the various manifestations of culture and art, the accusations that in every era have been flung at Spain.”
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