Vespasiano in America: conquistadors, gold, anti-Semitism, and the Spanish Black Legend

Abstract

One of the most persistent negative cultural stereotypes in the West is purveyed by the myth known as the “Spanish Black Legend,” a form of orientalism and anti-Semitism that portrays Spaniards as uniquely brutal and greedy, assigning to them the role of “the other” traditionally held by Muslims and Jews. This article examines the use made in the early modern era of medieval narratives about the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in AD 70, focusing on the anonymous late fifteenth-century Castilian romance known as the Historia del noble Vespasiano. The latter's dramatic visual illustrations of death, destruction and gold-ingesting prefigure some of the images of the conquistadors as articulated by the Spanish Black Legend, including the famous Theodore De Bry woodcut that depicts Indians pouring molten gold down the throats of Spaniards, a striking parallel with the scene of the Jews forced to eat powdered gold in Vespasiano.