[VOA]

I appreciate Madden's article, as well as his articles on The Crusades that appeared
in the wake of 9-11.
But, from my amateur and naive standing, I do take a little issue with this passage:

These were the years when the famous "Black Legend" of Spain was forged. Innumerable
books and pamphlets poured from northern presses accusing the Spanish Empire
of inhuman depravity and horrible atrocities in the New World. Opulent Spain was cast
as a place of darkness, ignorance, and evil.

I get the feeling that the truth was between the reality of the Opulent Spain
and the atrocities that the Conquistadors and other Spanish adventurers were
visiting on the New World. Weren't some of these even graphically recoreded in
a famed manuscript by some priest?
And even my friends from Mexico complain that the Spanish authorities made
bribery part of the governmental system in their New World holdings in order
to keep a tighter leash on their New World administrators.

I'm not running down the Spain of that time...at that point it may have been unfairly
criticized by the competitors in the emerging Protestant realm.

I'm just throwing this out there as "grist for the mill" because I think Madden
maybe didn't give "the rest of the story".

(and I admit that the when the Protestants came to North America...they repeated some of
the mistakes of the Spaniards, for sure)

[RobbyS]

Madden is only trying to correct the "historical record." There is no doubt that the Spanish Conquest had many bad effects on the Indians. But just to put matters into perspective, if you meet a Mexican, he is very likely to have an Indian Face. The Spaniards intermarried with the Indians, so that the Mexican Revolutionaries boasted of having recreated an "Indian" state. Servitude and disease decimated the Mexican population, so that the Spanish census of 1600 recorded only 1 million people. Today their number exceeds100 million and the great majority are Indian or mixed-blood. We all know what happened in Anglo-America.