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Facing a growing threat from the forces of liberalism and radicalism, Spanish conservatives and reactionaries developed a historical defense of the traditional order. Then it revived in the twentieth century. The Spanish counterattack subsided further in the century that began with the liberal Cortes of Cádiz and ended with the Generation of ’98 and its disillusioned self-criticism.
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But their concessions to foreign critics, the reasonable tone of their arguments, and their diminishing appeals to religion reflected Enlightenment influence. 5Įighteenth-century Spanish intellectuals continued to defend their country’s colonial record against foreign attack and to deplore the influence of Las Casas’ Very Brief Account. A typical contemporary Spanish comment on the book was the observation of the jurist and bibliographer Antonio de León Pinelo that foreigners valued it not for its learning, but for its strictures on the Conquistadores, “diminishing and destroying their exploits, exaggerating and elaborating their cruelties with a thousand synonyms: this delights foreigners.” 4 The celebrated jurist Solorzano, in his monumental Política indiana (1647), could still dissent from Las Casas’ views with expressions of respect for the learned Bishop of Chiapas, but the historian Antonio de Solís, whose book on the conquest of Mexico was published in 1684, harshly scolded Las Casas for his alleged services to Spain’s enemies. In 1659 the Aragonese Inquisition banned the Very Brief Account, and the ban was later extended to all of Spain. Only one edition of Las Casas’ Very Brief Account appeared in Spain during the seventeenth century appropriately enough, that edition was published in Barcelona during the Catalán revolt of 1646 against Castilian imperialism.
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After 1600 the memory of Las Casas fell under a heavy cloud. 3 But Spanish sensitivity to foreign criticism of Spain’s colonial record grew as her power in the Old and the New World declined. 2 His immense prestige served for a time to prevent the publication of such attacks upon him as that of Captain Vargas Machuca, who claimed that a “Huguenot translation” of the Very Brief Account spread lies about Spain and her work in the Indies. Simultaneously the influence of Las Casas and his Indianist movement virtually disappeared from the Spanish court. From his accession to the throne (1556), the dominant motive of Philip’s Indian policy was to augment the royal revenues in order to overcome the Crown’s desperate financial crisis. But while the Emperor Charles could allow a domestic debate on Spain’s Indian policies in the full sight and hearing of Europe, such a debate became unthinkable under his successor, Philip II. Royal fear of a colonial feudalism, more dangerous to the Crown than the shattered power of Indian kings and states, helps to explain the remarkable tolerance which allowed publication of this exposé. In 1552-1553 Bartolomé de las Casas published in Seville nine treatises severely critical of the Spanish Conquest in America, including the famous Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Arnoldsson makes no systematic effort to determine how much the Spaniards deserved this unfavorable opinion, but he concedes that the Spanish soldiery in Germany and the Netherlands did behave with cruelty, rapacity, and licentiousness. Sverker Arnoldsson 1 has shown that from the fourteenth century an unfavorable opinion of Spaniards prevailed among Italians as a result of the personal, economic, political, and cultural relations between the two peoples and that the nationalist and religious struggles of the sixteenth century provoked similar attitudes toward Spain in Germany and the Netherlands. If the essence of the Black Legend is defamatory criticism of Spain and the Spaniards, then the Legend has a history much older than the term itself. This essay attempts to test these premises, to clarify the meanings attached to the phrase, and to determine its historical accuracy.
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Despite its wide acceptance and use, however, it rests on premises whose validity has never been seriously questioned. T he term “B lack L egend” has long existed in the lexicon of Latin American history.