Black Legend

The Black Legend (Spanish: La Leyenda Negra) is a style of tendentious, nonobjective historical writing or propaganda that demonizes Spain, its people and its culture in an intentional attempt to damage its reputation. The Black Legend propaganda originated in the 16th century, a time of strong rivalry between European colonial powers. Among the first to describe and denounce this phenomenon was Julián Juderías in his book The Black Legend and the Historical Truth (Spanish: La Leyenda Negra y la Verdad Histórica), a critique published in 1914 that explains how this type of biased historiography has presented Spanish history in a deeply negative light, purposely ignoring positive achievements or advances. Though the term black legend for describing this anti-Spanish mythology was coined by Emilia Pardo Bazán in a conference, Paris, April 18, 1899. Later writers have supported and developed Juderías' critique. In 1958, Charles Gibson explained that Spain and the Spanish Empire were historically presented as "cruel, bigoted, exploitative and self-righteous in excess of reality."

In his book, Juderías defines the Black Legend 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."

Historian Philip Wayne Powell in Tree of Hate, gives this definition of 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"

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