La leyenda negra de España

This book, published for the first time a hundred years ago, is the most plagiarized in Spanish historiography. How is it possible that the history of a nation like Spain -creator of the first global empire, absolute protagonist of the Modern Age and responsible for the first great cultural and human hybridization between peoples from different continents- is today so unknown and scarcely valued by own and strangers? Some answers can be found in this work by the scholar Julián Juderías, written in 1914. Its author defined the object of his essay as follows: "By black legend we understand the atmosphere created by the fantastic stories that have come to light about our country public in almost all countries; the grotesque descriptions that have always been made of the character of the Spaniards as individuals and as a community [...]; the legend of inquisitorial Spain, ignorant, fanatical, incapable of appearing among educated peoples the same now than before, always ready for violent repression; enemy of progress or innovations; or, in other words, the legend that, having begun to spread in the 16th century, as a result of the Reformation, has not ceased to be used against our since then and more especially in critical moments of our national life".