page_title: Black legend
hierarchical_section_title: Black legend
caption_attribution_description: Spaniards killing women and children and feeding their remains to dogs. From "Illustrations de Narratio regionum Indicarum per Hispanos quosdam devastattarum"
context_page_description: A black legend is a historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them while hiding their positive contributions to history. The term was first used by French writer Arthur Lévy in his 1893 work Napoléon Intime, in contrast to the expression "Golden Legend" that had been in circulation around Europe since the publication of a book of that name during the Middle Ages.
  Black legends have been perpetrated against many nations and cultures, usually as a result of propaganda and xenophobia. For example, the "Spanish Black Legend" is the theory that anti-Portuguese and anti-Spanish political propaganda, whether about Spain, Portugal, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire or Hispanic America, was sometimes "absorbed and converted into broadly held stereotypes" that assumed that Spain and Portugal were "uniquely evil".
context_section_description: A  black legend is a historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them while hiding their positive contributions to history. The term was first used by French writer Arthur Lévy in his 1893 work Napoléon Intime, in contrast to the expression "Golden Legend" that had been in circulation around Europe since the publication of a book of that name during the Middle Ages.
  Black legends have been perpetrated against many nations and cultures, usually as a result of propaganda and xenophobia. For example, the "Spanish Black Legend" (Spanish: La leyenda negra española) is the theory that anti-Portuguese and anti-Spanish political propaganda, whether about Spain, Portugal, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire or Hispanic America, was sometimes "absorbed and converted into broadly held stereotypes" that assumed that Spain and Portugal were "uniquely evil".
caption: A 1598 propaganda engraving by Theodor de Bry depicting a Spaniard feeding Indian children to his dogs. De Bry's works are characteristic of the anti-Spanish propaganda that originated as a result of the Eighty Years' War.
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