Black Legend
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.
Though black legends can be perpetrated against any nation or culture, the term "The Black Legend" has come to refer specifically to "The Spanish Black Legend" (Spanish: La leyenda negra española) when not otherwise qualified; the theory that anti-Spanish political propaganda from the 16th century or earlier, 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".
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