Black Legend - Definitions

Definitions

The creator of the term, Julián Juderías, described it in 1914 in his book La Leyenda Negra as

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 always 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 against Spain. —Julián Juderías, La Leyenda Negra

The second classic work on the topic is Historia de la Leyenda Negra hispanoamericana (1943; History of the Hispanoamerican Black Legend), by Rómulo D. Carbia. While Juderías dealt more with the beginnings of the legend in Europe, the Argentine Carbia concentrated on America. Thus, Carbia gave a broader definition of the concept:

The legend finds its most usual expression, that is, its typical form, in judgments about cruelty, superstition, and political tyranny. They have preferred to see cruelty in the proceedings that were undertaken to implant the Faith in America or defend it in Flanders; superstition, in the supposed opposition by Spain to all spiritual progress and any intellectual activity; and tyranny, in the restrictions that drowned the free lives of Spaniards born in the New World and to which it seemed that they were enslaved indefinitely. —Rómulo D. Carbia, Historia de la leyenda negra hispano-americana (2004)

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

Philip Wayne Powell, in his book Tree of Hate, also defines the Black Legend:

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. Spaniards … have termed this process and the image that resulted from it as ‘The Black Legend,’ la leyenda negra" —Philip Wayne Powell, Tree of Hate (1985),

One recent author, Fernández Álvarez, has defined a Black Legend more broadly:

"the careful distortion of the history of a nation, perpetrated by its enemies, in order to better fight it. And a distortion as monstrous as possible, with the goal of achieving a specific aim: the moral disqualification of the nation, whose supremacy must be fought in every way possible. —Alfredo Alvar, La Leyenda Negra (1997:5)