Black Spanish Legend - a New Look

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EXAMINING THE SPANISH BLACK LEGEND A new understanding The Spanish Black Legend is a term which was used by Spanish intellectual, Julian Juderías in his 1914 book, “The Black Legend and Historical Truth”. He describes a propaganda campaign which had its roots in 16th century Europe. [1] Northern Europeans loathed Catholic Spain and envied its American empire. They published books and gory engravings that depicted Spanish colonization as uniquely barbarous: an orgy of greed, slaughter and papist depravity. Historians theorize that the English and the Dutch employed and encouraged the legend as part of their efforts to undermine the Spanish Empire. [2] One result of this propaganda, which has woven its way into the fabric our social consciousness, is a paradigm which holds that Spainish people and their descendants are inately cruel, bloodthirsty and depraved. How does a legend like this start? How does it continue? How do we overturn its effects? We can examine the economic, political and religious factors which influenced the origin of the legend. We can look at the books which supported and fueled this legend. We can observe some examples of how this legend has been kept alive more than 5 centuries after its origin. And then, from within this awareness, we can look at it with new eyes. We can unravel the myth. We can seek to discover what unites us rather than perpetuate what divides us. Influence of economic, political and religious factors. Economic factors: In 1453 the Ottoman Empire closed the overland spice trade routes to the Europeans. After that, Mediterranean ships carried the spices to the port of Venice for distribution to western Europe. This gave Venice a virtual monopoly on the spice trade. With the addition of taxes and tariffs, spices grew very expensive.[3] To
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