Black legend

La leyenda negra—“the black legend”—refers to an idea generated originally by Spanish historians to describe the ways the English characterized the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the century following the expedition of Christopher Columbus.

When the Spanish conquered much of the Western Hemisphere, some of their actions aroused attention by observers who believed that they used excessive force in their desire to take control of the indigenous peoples they encountered. The actions of conquisTADoRes such as Hernan Cortes, whose soldiers terrorized the Native peoples of Mexico during their campaign against the AzTEcs, aroused hostility not only from indigenous chroniclers but also from Spanish observers. Among those observers was Bartolome DE Las Casas, who launched a stinging assault on the con-quistadores’ ways in his reports on Spanish actions in the West Indies and on the mainland. His accounts, most notably his Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (first published in 1552), painted a devastating portrait of the plundering ways of conquistadores who enslaved some indigenous peoples and murdered others. Las Casas did not suggest that the Spanish should withdraw from the Western Hemisphere. Instead, he hoped that his writings would force the Spanish Crown to place controls over the actions of military leaders. Las Casas also continued to believe that the Spanish had to remain in the Americas in order to accomplish what he thought was the most important objective of the colonial enterprise: to convert Natives to Catholicism, a task that took on added urgency after Protestantism spread across much of northern Europe during the 16th century. In Las Casas’s mind the elaboration of the grotesque excesses of the con-quistadores would convince imperial bureaucrats that the conversion program would achieve its ends only if the ghastly abuses of human rights perpetrated by the conquistadores came to an end.

Although Las Casas intended his book to alter Spanish policy, in 16th-century Europe the diffusion of the technology that led to the printing press meant that publishers across the continent had the ability to spread the message of any text that came into their hands. Perhaps predictably, Las Casas’s work soon appeared, in translation, in Protestant nations, including England, as did other works that described horrendous Spanish actions, including Girolamo Benzoni’s History of the New World (first published in Venice in 1565).

The first English translation of Las Casas’s book appeared in London in 1583 with the title The Spanish Colonie. The timing of the publication proved to be crucial for the English, who were then in the process of organizing the first expedition to the area that would later be known as Roanoke. Las Casas’s testimony emboldened some of Queen Elizabeth I’s subjects, who were already looking for additional reasons to motivate their countrymen to launch colonization schemes.

When read by Protestant readers—English, Dutch, and Huguenot—such writings confirmed their worst fears about the Spanish. Here was proof, many thought, of the true nature of the Spanish. In the hands of skilled promoters of colonization like Richard Hakluyt the Younger and Samuel Purchas, Las Casas’s writings, which had once been conceived as a way to soften Spanish policy in the Atlantic, became an indictment of malevolent Catholics bent on killing any Native peoples they could not otherwise control. In this context the black legend became a further goad to colonization efforts by the English themselves.

Even after the English had colonized eastern North America, they continued to hold onto the belief in the black legend. No matter how violent the English themselves were to native American Indians (or, for that matter, how violent the English had been to the native Catholic Irish during the military assaults launched by Queen Elizabeth I during the mid - to late 16th century), they were, in their own minds, more humane than the Spanish had been. As the historian David Weber put it, “Anglo Americans had inherited the view that Spaniards were unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, cowardly, corrupt, decadent, indolent, and authoritarian,” and many of them held to such prejudices for centuries. When the Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry created illustrations to accompany translations of Las Casas’s work in the late 16th century, he managed to solidify, in the most graphic possible ways, the link between Spanish expansion and horrendous treatment of indigenous peoples. Such illustrations, like the text that inspired them, came to serve specific political ends. The black legend thus became entrenched in the ways that subsequent generations of observers understood the 16th century. The legend gained new life in England in the 1630s when a new translation of Las Casas’s book appeared, this time with the title The Tears of the Indians. Printed in London in 1636, over a decade after the horrendous violence had turned Powhatans and English against each other in Virginia and in the midst of the so-called “Great Migration” of the Puritans to New England, the new book included a graphic illustration of Spaniards hanging a group of Native Americans. By then, Europeans understood the power of images, and this new illustration took its place among those that Protestants used to justify their expansion into the Western Hemisphere. Another edition appeared in 1656, with a subtitle that told a new generation about the “cruel massacres and slaughters of above twenty millions of innocent people; committed by the Spaniards in the islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, &c. As also, in the continent of Mexico, Peru, & other places of the West-Indies, to the total destruction of those countries.”

The survival of the black legend, then, needs to be understood in its context. Las Casas had offered a devastating report of the cruelties perpetrated by Spanish conquista-dores. But it was the translation of the account and its spread into Protestant lands that gave the myth its enduring power, generation after generation deep into the 17th century.

Further reading: Bartolome de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. Anthony Pag-den (London: Penguin Books, 1992); J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. 336-341.

Blaeu, Willem (1571-1638) cartographer Willem Janszoon Blaeu and his son, Joan Blaeu, were among the most important cartographers of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Willem Blaeu produced globes, sea charts, and maps, including a map of Holland (1604), a map of Spain (1605), and a large world map (1605). His maps and those of his son were noted for their beauty and for the skill of their production. In 1608 he produced maps of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and in 1633-34 became mapmaker for the Dutch East India Company. His map “Nova Belgica et Anglia Nova” (1635) was the first printed map to depict canoes and North American animals, including the beaver. The Blaeu family’s most important works include two atlases: the Appendix Theatri Ortelii et Atlantis Mercatoris, published in 1631, and the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum sive Novus Atlas, first published in 1635. Their maps were reprinted in various editions and languages during the 17th century.

Further reading: Cornelis Koeman,”Atlas Cartography in the Low Countries in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries,” in John A. Wolter and Ronald E. Grim, eds., Images of the World: The Atlas through History (Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress, 1997), 73-107; Seymour I. Schwartz and Ralph E. Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1980); R. V Tooley, Maps and Map-Makers (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1987).

—Martha K. Robinson