Spaniards have termed this process and the image that resulted from it as ‘The Black Legend.’ ” Here is a more recent definition by a Protestant American historian, Philip Wayne Powell, from his book Tree of Hate: “An image of Spain circulated through late sixteenth century Europe borne by means of political and religious propaganda that blackened the characters of Spaniards and their ruler to such an extent that Spain became the symbol of all forces of repression, brutality, religious and political intolerance and intellectual and artistic backwardness for the next four centuries. In order to begin to understand this complex topic, we must first settle on a working definition of the meaning of the term “Black Legend.” Let us then start with the man who coined the phrase, the Spaniard Julian Juderias, in his book, La Leyenda Negra (The Black Legend), of 1914: “(It is) The environment created by the fantastic stories about our homeland that have seen the light of publicity in all countries, the grotesque descriptions that have been made of the character of Spaniards as individuals and collectively, the denial or at least the systematic ignorance of all that is favorable and beautiful in the various manifestations of culture and art, the accusations that in every era have been flung at Spain.”
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