Whatever its intellectual limitations, the controversy over the Black Legend eventually resulted in a rough consensus. No one has claimed that the Spanish were without guilt, but were they in fact worse than their imperial rivals? If they were not, then the Black Legend was by definition false. This crucial point has not always been acknowledged. As Gibson pointed out, if the term 'Black Legend' is to have meaning, it must refer to the assumption that Spanish actions were uniquely evil. Additional confusion arose from Keen's refusal to compare Spanish behavior with that of other nations. The process by which propaganda, much of it ephemeral, was absorbed and converted into broadly held stereotypes therefore remained unclear, and the usefulness of the Black Legend as a case history in the development of national consciousness went largely unexplored. 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 Juderías had not been forgotten. Keen warned against the promulgation of a White Legend by those sympathetic to Spanish culture. Francisco López de Gómara, 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 Ramón Menéndez 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 Juderías, 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 Rómulo Carbia applied the concept to the historical treatment of the Spanish conquest of America and linked the Black Legend specifically to the work of Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose Brevísima Relación de la destrucción 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, Juderías 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 Julián Juderías in his book La Leyenda negra y la verdad histórica (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.

Black legend definition