Summary: Analyzing The Spaniards That Cruel
Were the Spaniards That Cruel? by Gregory Cerio
(Newsweek [Special Issue], Fall/Winter 1991, pp. 48-51)
[online source: Columbus and the Age of Discovery Text Archive, Millersville University http://muweb.millersville.edu/~columbus/data/art/CERIO-01.ART]
For the Spanish, the Columbus Quincentennial stirs an ambivalent nostalgia, blending pride and pain. Spain's shining memories of its Golden Age, when the nation stood at the summit of world power, have been tarnished by critics who call the 1492 arrival of the Spanish in the New World "an invasion" fueled by greed and leading to "genocide." In their words, Spaniards hear echoes of age-old malevolence: a body of anti-Spanish prejudices they know as la leyenda negra, the Black Legend, that tarred the Spanish as incomparably savage and avaricious. It created a national image that Spain is still trying to dispel. …show more content…
Throughout the century and beyond it, pamphleteers from London to Frankfurt made malice toward the Spanish a byword of patriotism. Their tracts depicted the Spanish as a people inherently barbaric, corrupt and intolerant; lovers of cruelty and bloodshed. "Tyranny," one 1597 French screed began, "is as proper and natural to a Spaniard as laughter is to a man." Others warned that if Europeans had been outraged by the Inquisition, or by Spain's expulsion of the Jews in 1492 (two centuries, it should be noted, after they were expelled from England), these were kindnesses compared to what Spain did in the Americas. William of Orange, the Dutch nobleman who led the Protestants of Holland in revolt against Spanish authority, railed in 1580 that Spain "committed such horrible excesses that all the barbarities, cruelties and tyrannies ever perpetrated before are only games in comparison to what happened to the poor
(Newsweek [Special Issue], Fall/Winter 1991, pp. 48-51)
[online source: Columbus and the Age of Discovery Text Archive, Millersville University http://muweb.millersville.edu/~columbus/data/art/CERIO-01.ART]
For the Spanish, the Columbus Quincentennial stirs an ambivalent nostalgia, blending pride and pain. Spain's shining memories of its Golden Age, when the nation stood at the summit of world power, have been tarnished by critics who call the 1492 arrival of the Spanish in the New World "an invasion" fueled by greed and leading to "genocide." In their words, Spaniards hear echoes of age-old malevolence: a body of anti-Spanish prejudices they know as la leyenda negra, the Black Legend, that tarred the Spanish as incomparably savage and avaricious. It created a national image that Spain is still trying to dispel. …show more content…
Throughout the century and beyond it, pamphleteers from London to Frankfurt made malice toward the Spanish a byword of patriotism. Their tracts depicted the Spanish as a people inherently barbaric, corrupt and intolerant; lovers of cruelty and bloodshed. "Tyranny," one 1597 French screed began, "is as proper and natural to a Spaniard as laughter is to a man." Others warned that if Europeans had been outraged by the Inquisition, or by Spain's expulsion of the Jews in 1492 (two centuries, it should be noted, after they were expelled from England), these were kindnesses compared to what Spain did in the Americas. William of Orange, the Dutch nobleman who led the Protestants of Holland in revolt against Spanish authority, railed in 1580 that Spain "committed such horrible excesses that all the barbarities, cruelties and tyrannies ever perpetrated before are only games in comparison to what happened to the poor