Summarize the common arguments from the sources: What is the Black Legend? When does it begin? Who started it? Who promoted it? How did it circulate? Whom did it serve? What is the evaluation of historians and critics? What is true? What is legend? What is common as far as imperial practices go? What is different in the case of Spain? What is your evaluation of the Black Legend in terms of Spain's image in the international landscape across the centuries?
Make sure that your summary contains specific references to some of the sources you consulted.
Pose a question to invite peer feedback. A question could be related to an aspect of the discussion or summary that you find particularly challenging or ambivalent. Perhaps other perspectives will help you grapple with the material.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=HQPA5oNpfM4)
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/10/a-loving-ambivalence 1/9 A Loving Ambivalence firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/10/a-loving-ambivalence 1. by Helen Andrews 10 . 8 . 18 The Controversy of Valladolid of 1550 was one of the great dramatic set pieces of the Spanish Conquest. For six days straight, two men debated the morality of Spain’s treatment of the Indians in the New World. On one side was Bartolomé de las Casas, age sixty-five, then at the climax of a lifetime of humanitarian advocacy on behalf of the Indians. On the other was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, former history tutor to the heir to the throne and a staunch defender of the conquistadors. Judging their arguments was a panel of Spain’s most distinguished minds, and behind them loomed the figure of Charles V, ruler of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The emperor had put a moratorium on all new expeditions in America while the morality of the conquest was being settled. Whether that moratorium would be lifted, and under what terms, was to be decided by this titanic battle. Amazingly, the outcome of the debate is unknown. If the judges of the junta wrote opinions, those documents have been lost to history, and we possess no record of any verdict from the Council of the Indies. Obviously Spain did not relinquish her possessions in the New World. On the other hand, she did not abandon her efforts at legislative protection of the natives, either. It was too late to save the Tainos and the Caribbean’s other peaceful tribes, but Las Casas can claim credit for the fact that Mexico never became a slave society, thanks to policy decisions made by the imperial court during his period of greatest influence. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/10/a-loving-ambivalence https://www.firstthings.com/author/helen-rittelmeyer 10/12/2019 A Loving Ambivalence | Helen Andrews | First Things https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/10/a-loving-ambivalence 2/9 Five centuries later, the moral victory has clearly gone to Las Casas. His Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies remains a standard work on the Conquest, notwithstanding the transparent implausibility of its long-debunked death counts. The so-called “Black Legend”—the idea that Spanish imperialism was categorically more brutal than any other country’s—derives in large part from the Brief Relation, which was immediately translated into every European language and enthusiastically embraced by Spain’s Protestant rivals, especially after Flemish engraver and virulent anti-Catholic Theodor de Bry introduced his gory illustrations in 1590. Readers whose knowledge of Spanish history does not come from picture books have been more skeptical of the fiery Dominican. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the most eminent Hispanist of his generation, concluded in 1963 that “the only way to understand [Las Casas] is to assume that he is mentally ill.” Las Casas has been called a paranoiac, a fanatic, a chronic exaggerator, and an impossible man to work with. His defenders, of course, say that intractability is only to be expected from prophets. Like the Valladolid debate, this historiographical dispute has produced no conclusive verdict. That may be a blessing. In the absence of a final judgment, we are free to form our own conclusions. It is tempting to think of Las Casas as a voice crying in the wilderness, but in fact his campaign of denunciation brought him worldly success and the favor of the establishment. In 1516, when he was only 31 and they were two of the most powerful men at court, he succeeded in having Bishop Rodríguez de Fonseca and Lope Conchillos fired from their positions as ministers in charge of the Indies. When Charles V sent three monks from the Order of St. Jerome to investigate conditions in the Caribbean, he let Las Casas choose and accompany them under the title “Protector of the Indians.” The Hieronymites were the first of many colleagues to turn on Las Casas. Their report to the crown concluded that, if Las Casas were heeded and the Indians left at liberty, they would never advance beyond pre-agricultural barbarism, much less adopt Christianity. By that time, Las Casas had already moved on to his next project, nothing short of the peaceful colonization of the entire northern coast of South America. Ultimately his royal grant fell short of the entire coast, but it still included almost all of present-day Venezuela and most of Colombia. Las Casas obtained such a lavish charter by promising to give the king ten thousand new taxpaying subjects within two years. These would include peasant settlers brought out from Spain as well as Indians newly organized into towns. Bishop Fonseca (back in the king’s good graces) warned Las Casas that others had tried peasant settlement schemes and “couldn’t find twenty workers to go.” Las Casas swore he would find thousands. In the end he found fewer than a hundred, not one of whom ever made it to South America. https://www.amazon.com/Short-Account-Destruction-Indies/dp/0140445625/?tag=firstthings20-20 10/12/2019 A Loving Ambivalence | Helen Andrews | First Things https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/10/a-loving-ambivalence 3/9 The expedition was a disaster. The settlers abandoned Las Casas in Puerto Rico at the first sign of delay. The two missionary outposts that were supposed to serve as beachheads were destroyed by Indian attacks, one in the weeks before Las Casas arrived, the other a few months after he and his remaining men established themselves. Las Casas had sensed impending trouble there in the coastal village of Cumaná, but rather than stay and put his pacific principles into practice, he ran off to Hispaniola to file bureaucratic complaints against the local traders and soldiers whom he blamed for the rising tensions. The men he left behind at Cumaná were killed. (Some idea of what a more decisive man might have accomplished can be gathered from an apt coincidence: In the very months when Las Casas was making a hash of his Venezuelan expedition—the summer of 1520 through the fall of 1521—Hernán Cortés went from the lowest point in his conquest of Mexico, the abject rout of the Noche Triste when his forces were slaughtered by the thousands as they fled Tenochtitlan, to the capture of Cuauhtémoc and undisputed mastery of the Aztec empire.) In his account of the incident written decades later, Las Casas absolved himself of responsibility for the deaths of his men at Cumaná. It was the fault of those traders and soldiers who had refused to recognize his authority. That was the way his guilt worked. From the moment of his moral crisis in 1514, when he gave up his encomienda in Cuba and turned to a life of activism, Las Casas had felt the moral stain of each Spanish atrocity as if he were personally implicated. He was the original humanitarian personality, the first sign of the shift from pre-modern to modern ideas of moral heroism, from Christian saints to human rights activists. It is ironic that he should have so easily shrugged off the deaths for which he really was individually responsible—ironic, and yet entirely in keeping with his twentieth- century successors on the revolutionary left. If there was an underdog at Valladolid, it was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. No one ever put him in charge of thousands of square miles of tropical real estate. He was a scholar whose highest previous post had been official Greek translator at the papal court of Clement VII. To the university professors on the judges’ panel at Valladolid, Sepúlveda was a man out of his depth. They were scholastics of the old school, trained in the methods of Aquinas, to whom Sepúlveda was an upstart rhetorician who had the nerve to opine on moral questions without the proper theological grounding. Sepúlveda’s book in defense of the conquistadors was never published in Spain during his lifetime, thanks to lobbying by Las Casas to have it censored by the royal licensing office. It seems strange to think of the pro-conquest side as being at a disadvantage, but modern readers should remember that the debate at Valladolid was not just about conquest, for or against. Charles V’s priority was limiting the power of American landowners in order to prevent the emergence of an aristocracy that would threaten his power. That, and not 10/12/2019 A Loving Ambivalence | Helen Andrews | First Things https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/10/a-loving-ambivalence 4/9 humanitarianism, was the reason for his hostility to the feudal encomienda system of compulsory labor. The clergy wanted to see the natives protected from abuse—as did the king and for that matter Sepúlveda—but it was not clear how this should be accomplished. Passing humane laws had not worked; local officials simply ignored them. Colonists protested that if forced labor were abolished, there would be no one to work the fields and the conquistadors would starve. Spain itself was full of noble estates in which peasants provided food for their lords in exchange for military protection and capital. It was the bargain that had made possible the Reconquista. Sepúlveda’s goal was to come up with a long-term solution that would balance humanitarian concerns with the colony’s need for a labor supply. Bringing out peasant settlers from Spain would not fill the gap, as Las Casas learned the hard way. Sepúlveda thought the answer was to create a fully functioning New World aristocracy, replacing the criminals and lowlifes who had followed Columbus with men of better morals. The most enlightened laws in the world would founder if implemented by ruffians. Also, distance posed an unavoidable problem. The king needed men in America whom he could trust to make decisions on the spot when circumstances required immediate action, as they often did in a frontier situation. Attracting a better class of hidalgo might require some sweeteners the king was reluctant to grant, like making encomiendas heritable, but it was the best way to guarantee the human rights of the natives. Spaniards also have human rights, as Sepúlveda reminded his audience at Valladolid. Christian missionaries have a right to preach the gospel peacefully without getting massacred. International law had recognized this as a basic corollary of universal principles of hospitality since the time of the Romans. With an advanced civilization like the Aztecs, one might negotiate a treaty concerning the rights of missionaries, but with pre-literate tribes in a place like Guatemala, how could such rights be guaranteed? In order to create the conditions of peace and order that would make peaceful propagation of the gospel possible, such peoples would simply have to be ruled, as the Roman empire had ruled Hispania, until the Indians “have become more civilized and, through our governance, probity in their mores and the Christian religion have taken firm roots,” at which point they could “be given treatment of greater liberty.” As for the labor problem, Sepúlveda, like most imperial theorists, recommended preserving existing institutions as far as possible. The Aztecs had developed an advanced tribute system in order to support the urban metropolis of Tenochtitlan, which relied for its food on surrounding farmland worked by peasant vassals. Successful Aztec military commanders were awarded lands in conquered territories, much as in Spain. Some Mexican peasants were slaves, others were free commoners who were nonetheless subject to forced labor on