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INTRODUCTION the Black Legend Revisited1 Most Historical Autopsies INTRODUCTION The Black Legend Revisited1 Most historical autopsies of the Spanish empire have tended to focus their attention on the ways in which the imperial project began to falter in the sixteenth century. A typical claim, that Castilians sacrifi ced all their gains for religious unity, is based on the tired stereotype that Span- iards were ‘hard-wired’ for decline—that their dogmatic and infl exible disposition compromised the imperial agenda.2 The standard narrative begins in the reign of Isabel of Castile (r. 1474–1504) and Fernando of Aragon (r. 1479–1516), the Catholic Monarchs who established a national inquisition and centralized government in order to purify the religious landscape of Spain. “Unity and purity of the faith,” as 1 The Black Legend contains a range of myths about Spain as a “dreadful engine of tyranny” (Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision [ New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998; 1997], 305; citing John Foxe, The Book of Martyrs [ London, 1863], 153). Similarly, the Spanish implemented “a system of severe repression of thought by all the instrumentalities of Inquisition and state” (Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, 4 vols. [ New York: Macmillan, 1906–1907], 4: 528). For analysis of the myths based on inquisitorial evidence, see Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 305–320. Julián Juderías coined the term ‘Black Legend’ in order to frame confessional historiography (La leyenda negra: estudios acerca del concepto de España en el extranjero [Madrid: Editorial Nacional, 1974; 1914]): “en una palabra, entendemos por leyenda negra de la España inquisitorial, ignorante, fanática, incapaz de fi gurar entre los pueblos cultos lo mismo ahora que antes, dispuesta siempre a las represiones violentas; enemiga del progreso y de las innovaciones; o, en otros términos, la leyenda que habiendo empezado a difundirse en el siglo XVI, a raíz de la Reforma, no ha dejado de utilizarse en contra nuestra desde entonces, y más especialmente en momentos críticos de nuestra vida nacional” (30). For treatment of the Protestant origins of the Black Legend, see J.N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700: The Formation of a Myth, History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), chapter eight, “The Low Countries: The Origins of the Black Legend”; William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1550–1660 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1971); Charles Gibson, The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New (New York: Knopf, 1971). 2 For treatment of Spanish orthodoxy and the historical problem of antagonism and boundaries between confessions, see Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, 2 vols. (Madrid: BAC, 1978; 1880–1882). The issue of myths (e.g., religious unity and “one, eternal Spain”) is discussed in J.N. Hillgarth, “Spanish His- toriography and Iberian Reality,” History and Theory 24 (1985): 23–43. 2 introduction Roger Bigelow Merriman wrote, “were the cornerstone of [Isabel of Castile’s policy], and in her eyes, the fi rst essentials to the unity of the state.”3 Isabel’s successors, the Habsburgs, likewise took up the sword Castilians gave them, and together with their Spanish subjects they embarked on crusades—killing non-conforming Christians and initiating the Counter Reformation, which intensifi ed into a variety of full-blown xenophobic policies, from Philip II’s efforts to destroy Dutch freedoms to Philip III’s decision to expel the Moriscos in 1609.4 When Castilians arrived in the New World, the narrative continues, they gave in to a perennial obsession with conquest that would eventually undermine their global reach, but would leave behind an unshakable legacy of corruption throughout Latin America.5 Such studies in the causes of decline often tacitly assume that consistent and ingrained Castilian mentalities underwrote aggressive policies that included the reconquista, the persecution of minorities, and the virtual enslavement of the American Indians.6 Too busy seeking religious unity through inquisitorial mechanisms and bloody conquest, the Castilians were, meanwhile, unable to compete with the more industrious merchants and free-thinking souls of the United Provinces and England.7 The 3 Roger Bigelow Merriman, The Rise of the Spanish Empire in the Old World and in the New, 4 vols. (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1962: 1918), 1: 86, 91. 4 On xenophobia, see William Monter, The Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 43. 5 For the Black Legend and the conquest, see Gibson, The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New; Sverker Arnoldsson, La conquista española de América según el juicio de la posteridad: vestigios de la leyenda negra (Madrid: Insula, 1960). For the thesis that the conquistadores and the medieval warriors were pugnacious brothers in crime, see James F. Powers, A Society Organized for War: The Iberian Municipal Militias in the Central Middle Ages, 1000–1284 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 201–213. For the claim of the prevalence of Spanish crusading culture in New Spain, see Thomas F. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades (New York: Rowman & Littlefi eld Publishers, 2006), 224–225. For stereotypes of the Spanish as “brutal,” “great Indian killers,” and as “pork-hungry Iberians” who were inferior farmers because “close attention to farming was simply not a Castilian virtue,” see Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003; 1972), 36–38, 70, 78 passim. 6 For repetition of claims, see Wim Blockmans, “Die Untertanen des Kaisers,” in Karl V. 1500–1558 und seine Zeit, ed. Hugo Soly (Cologne: DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2003; 2000), 227–283, especially 239. 7 For an analysis of the Spanish character and work ethic, see Bartolomé Bennas- sar, The Spanish Character: Attitudes and Mentalities from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, trans. Benjamin Keen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 15–18. For a critical assessment of Spanish stereotypes, see Ruth MacKay, Lazy, Improvident People: Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), introduction..
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