Black legend

This realization is a good thing, obviously, but it leads us to one of the big problems when it comes to studying this time and place.

The Black Legend is the tale that the Spanish unleashed unspeakable cruelty on the Indians.

Now that tale is true, but that idea was used by later settlers, especially the English, to justify their own settlements.

Like, part of the reason they needed to expand their empire was to save the Indians from the awful Spanish, but were the English so much better? Yeah, probably not.

Two errors are equally available here, and traditional Catholics should refuse both.

The first is the black legend cartoon, Millions Murdered, Jews Targeted Purely for Being Jews.

The record does not support it.

The tribunal's original mission was over-baptized Catholics accused of a real canonical offense, heresy through secret Judaizing.

Exactly the distinction St. Thomas draws.

Not Jewish ethnicity as such.

And the death toll was far smaller than the black legend's estimates.

The Inquisition also did real good.

And this is where history gets a bit more interesting than the legend.

For centuries, anti-Spanish propaganda, what historians often call the Black Legend, helped create an image of an Inquisition that was constantly torturing and burning enormous numbers of people.

The reality was still brutal, but the modern historians working through the Inquisition's enormous surviving archives have produced much lower estimates of executions in Spain itself.

A commonly cited modern range is somewhere between 3,000 to 5,000 executions over its roughly three and a half centuries of existence.