![]() The causes of this have been suggested as: Motivations for actions are often offered, but they are either one single motivation or two, negative, clear cut, and constant.īlack legends The Spanish Black Legend įactors that would set the Spanish Black Legend apart from others might include its abnormal permeation and outreach across nations, its racialized component, and its abnormal persistence through time. Simplicity of elements, often repetition of the same anecdotes or scenarios with different variations.A theme, usually greed, cruelty, sadism or bigotry, that constructs a consistent character and remains stable through the legend, even if the specific "proofs" to support it may change or even become opposite to the initial ones.Greed, materialism, accusations of disrespect for sacred, or very important institutions or moral rules.Lack of intellectual refinement or independence. Sexual elements, either extreme sexual depravity or repression or more often a combination of both.Detailed, gruesome and morbid descriptions of torture and violence, which in many cases does not seem to serve any practical purpose.Strong pathos, combined with a narrative that is easy to follow and emotionally loaded, created by: Narrations of black legends tend to include: The black legend has a final tone in which no hope of improvement is given, for the defects have been there from the beginning and cannot be overcome due to, usually, moral weakness. Natural moral inferiority and irredeemable character.When a noble action by the subject cannot be denied, it is somehow presented as done out of self-interest or out of necessity. Black legends tend to minimize the merits they cannot fully erase or hide, by either portraying them as "mere luck", opportunism or, at best, as isolated qualities. The subject is portrayed as a degenerated form of another, usually another civilization, nation, religion, race or person, who represents the true, pure and noble form of whatever the subject of the black legend should have been, and that tends to coincide with whoever is building the legend. Degenerated or polluted version of something else.Black legends tend to portray their subjects as being in a permanent estate of degeneration. Black legends also tend to share certain additional elements: The defining feature of a black legend is that it has been fabricated and propagated intentionally. The said black legend tends to fade once the next great power is established or once enough time has gone by.Ĭommon elements of black legends The need of the new powers consolidated during the empire's life or after its dissolution to justify their new prevalence and the new order.The self-criticism of the intellectual elite, which tends to be larger in larger empires.The propaganda created by the many rival power factions within the empire itself against each other as part of their struggle to win more power.The combined propaganda attacks and efforts of most smaller powers of the time, as well as defeated rivals.The black legend of empires would be the result of the following combined factors: as cited in Alfredo Alvar's book, La Leyenda Negra (1997:5)Īccording to historian Elvira Roca Barea, the formation of a black legend and its assimilation by the nation that suffers it is a phenomenon observed in all multicultural empires, not just in the Spanish Empire. ![]() For example, the " Spanish Black Legend" ( Spanish: La leyenda negra española) is the theory that anti-Spanish political propaganda, whether about Spain, the Spanish Empire or Hispanic America, was sometimes "absorbed and converted into broadly held stereotypes" that assumed that Spain was "uniquely evil". īlack legends have been perpetrated against many nations and cultures, usually as a result of propaganda and xenophobia. The term was first used by French writer Arthur Lévy in his 1893 work Napoléon Intime, in contrast to the expression " Golden Legend" that had been in circulation around Europe since the publication of a book of that name during the Middle Ages. De Bry's works are characteristic of the anti-Spanish propaganda that originated as a result of the Eighty Years' War.Ī black legend is a historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them while hiding their positive contributions to history. A 1598 propaganda engraving by Theodor de Bry depicting a Spaniard feeding Indian children to his dogs.
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