With few exceptions, contributors to the debate failed to distinguish the Black Legend as a body of anti- Spanish literature from the Black Legend as a component of popular mentality. These disputes were clouded from the beginning by problems of definition. Though generally balanced in his approach, Gibson was more sympathetic to Hanke than to Keen. In a collection of documents published in 1971, Charles Gibson recognized this fact and provided examples of anti-Spanish writing from the sixteenth century to the twentieth that reflect a wide spectrum of political and intellectual hostility. Italy, Germany, England, and the Netherlands developed 'Black Legends' of their own, in most cases as a reaction to the development of Spain as a world power in the sixteenth century. The work of Sverker Arnoldsson (1960), William Maltby (1971), and others showed that anti-Spanish attitudes predated the publication of Las Casas and had multiple roots. The Keen-Hanke debates narrowed the Black Legend to the single issue of the Conquest, but the broader accusations of JuderГas had not been forgotten. Keen warned against the promulgation of a White Legend by those sympathetic to Spanish culture. Francisco LГіpez de GГіmara, Girolamo Benzoni, and other chroniclers of the Conquest provided independent support for the accusations of Las Casas, and their works, too, had been widely circulated throughout Europe. The Black Legend, in other words, was not legend but fact. Opposition to Hanke's views came primarily from Benjamin Keen (1969), who noted that neither the bishop nor his reforms had done the Indians much good, and that the Spanish Conquest was as brutal and unprincipled as Las Casas had claimed. This position was hailed by RamГіn MenГ©ndez Pidal in his El Padre Las Casas, su doble personalidad (1963), a curious work that went on, somewhat inconsistently, to accuse Las Casas of paranoia. Though the works of Las Casas were misused by Spain's enemies, his career in itself was a partial refutation of the Black Legend. Only Spain had attempted to place its conquests on a moral footing. Hanke contended that the efforts of Las Casas and the legislation that resulted from them were unique in the history of colonizing powers. The publication of Lewis Hanke's The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949) opened a North American debate over the Black Legend and placed Las Casas squarely at its center. Like JuderГas, Carbia was primarily interested in defending the Spanish record. In Carbia's view, Las Casas had exaggerated the brutality of the Conquest in an effort to secure improved treatment for the Indians, and in so doing he had provided Spain's political and religious enemies with a rich source of propaganda. In 1944 the Argentine scholar RГіmulo Carbia applied the concept to the historical treatment of the Spanish conquest of America and linked the Black Legend specifically to the work of BartolomГ© de Las Casas, whose BrevГsima RelaciГіn de la destrucciГіn de las Indias had been widely circulated in translation since the sixteenth century.

His book, which was extremely popular in Spain, is basically a defense of Spanish accomplishments. The author of revisionist works on a variety of topics, JuderГas was convinced that Spain and its culture had been systematically vilified by foreign authors who were inspired by Protestantism or the Enlightenment. The term was apparently coined by JuliГЎn JuderГas in his book La Leyenda negra y la verdad histГіrica (1914). The national stereotype derived from this literature portrays the Spanish as uniquely cruel, bigoted, lazy, and ignorant. The Black Legend, a body of traditional literature hostile to Spain, its people, and its culture.

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