The Black Legend - Week 4

It is hard to image that as historians concentrating on early Latin American history, Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest did not have the Black Legend in the back of their minds when writing their book, Religion and Empire.  Just how much the Black Legend and its legacy affected their book is hard to say but it seems clear to me that they indirectly address and refute it in their book. When the facts have been skewed and distorted and the truth is finally presented, that truth is very much connected to the false information that was previously believed.

The Black Legend is centered on the idea of the Spanish Conquistadors being barbaric, heartless, and even animal-like in their conquest of the native people of what is now known as Latin America. The Spanish are reduced to cold-blooded murderers if innocent men, women, and children. The Black Legend paints a two sided picture; on one side: the blood-thirsty Spaniards, and on the other: the helpless, innocent, and peaceful indigenous peoples who were mercilessly slaughtered by the European invaders.

            Conrad and Demarest do not speak to the first aspect of the Black Legend but they provide an in depth refutation of the second. The authors explain the culture and history of the Native peoples of Mexica, specifically the Aztec, in a way that makes it impossible to see the indigenous peoples and helpless, innocent, or peaceful. The authors do not contest that the Spanish were cruel and unjustifiably killed and took advantage of the native peoples but they, in their explanation of the native peoples and their own, religiously enforced, merciless conquest of other native peoples, indirectly refute the Black Legend myth of the natives being peaceful and helpless. In fact, when pointing out that their “imperial cosmology held that the Mexica must relentlessly take captives in warfare and sacrifice them” and that “it was specifically the Mexicas’ sacred duty to pursue a course of endless warfare, conquest, and sacrifice”, the authors make the natives out to look surprisingly similar to the European invaders that would later conquer them (p 38).