Most undeserved Dark Legends in History

The reputation of Jesuits were torture-happy religious fanatics seems particularly undeserved.

The fact that they prosecuted "heretics" who were mostly converted Muslims and Jews is probably a part of why they're seen so dimly. Doesn't really matter how "fair" they are if their main purpose was to persecute religious minorities.
My point exactly.
 
It's not a mystery that what most people believe about a certain topic isn't necessarily true and about Dark Legends there're a lot of commonplaces that are regarded as "pure gold".
I'd like to have a list of them to help me and anyone else who is interested in Actual and/or Alternate History. I hope you'll help me with your ideas 'cause I know I'm not perfect and I may be victim of some of this Legends too.
I'll start with the most famous ones:
- Christianity caused the end of Rome.
- The Vikings were uncivilized savages.
- The Mongols were uncivilized savages.
- The Renaissance started only after (and because) Costantinople was conquered in 1453.
- The Inquisition burned millions (According to someone even trillions!) of innocent witches/heretics.
- Nobody before Columbus knew there was anything on the other side of the Atlantic.
- Spanish Dark Legend (The one that gave me inspiration.):
- - Military:
- - - Spanish army was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - - Spanish navy was the worst in Europe in the XV, XVI and XVII centuries.
- - Economy:
- - - There were no banks in Spain before 1700.
Was Herodes really a vile tyrant ?
 
Sure, but it's also widely understood that the vast majority was due to disease-- which would have spread simply due to contact of any sort. The only way to prevent it would be to quarantine the New World, and that's not even vaguely realistic. Bottom line: while the Spaniards no doubt did bad things, that massive death toll stems from something that wasn't specifically or uniquely their doing. If the disease problem hadn't existed, then the death toll would be very small compared to what we see in OTL. In fact, when we look at the number of Native Americans in Latin America, and the degree of mixing of population, and then contrast that with the situation in Anglo-America... well. The impression arises that the Anglos were far, far more thorough in any active extermination efforts. And that the Spanish primarily get the bad rep as "ultra-exterminators" because they were the first guys "on the scene", and thus doing their colonising when the waves of disease burned through the New World.

Naturally, this does not excuse any atrocities that were committed, but it does indicate that the image of Spanish colonialism being uniquely worse than that of other countries is not correct. (And in fact, Spanish colonialism may in certain ways have been marginally "less bad" for Native Americans than Anglo colonialism.)
As was pointed out, the Spanish colonized the areas of the Americas which had by far the largest and densest native populations. The death tolls were also exacerbated by colonial policies such as the enslavement (in name or otherwise) of a multitude of native workers forced to do dangerous and deadly work. In colonial Bolivia it's estimated around 8 millions slaves (both Indians and Africans brought over to replace rapidly dying Indian populations) died working in the silver mines. And then there's all the numerous massacres, one Spanish priest describes whole provinces in the Yucatan being practically depopulated to bring "peace". Which is particularly frightening when that priest himself was also guilty of numerous abuses including burning people at the stake but even he considered the behavior of other Spaniards to be beyond the pale.
 
Continuing on the Christian line: the idea that biblical inerrantism was at all a common position prior to the twentieth century (and especially that it was a universal position prior to Darwin, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, or any historical period of choice that really just singles out the Middle Ages). The idea that the Old Testament creation story should be taken as a literal scientific narrative, with no room for innovation or contradiction, was not a medieval one in the slightest. Most educated medieval people subscribed to Aristotelian-Ptolemaian astronomy, which originally had absolutely nothing to do with the Biblical myth and indeed contradicted it in several key aspects - especially by omission: the Bible says nothing about the astronomic "spheres" or even the planets themselves. They certainly didn't think of the latter as a guide, or even a starting point, for scientific inquiry.

Instead, the prevailing position prior to the Reformation, and moreover prior to the codification of Evangelical fundamentalism in the 1910's, was Biblical infallibilism: the belief that the Bible, once mediated through ecclesiastical interpretation, was correct on all ethical and theological points. Some Biblical assertions that we might consider "scientific" or "historical" today may have been considered as such in the Middle Ages, but all of them were more importantly allegorical revelations.

So if some idiot like Dawkins comes along thinking he's dismantled the entire medieval worldview because "how could there have been days before the Sun was made???", you should know better.
 
Sure, but it's also widely understood that the vast majority was due to disease-- which would have spread simply due to contact of any sort. The only way to prevent it would be to quarantine the New World, and that's not even vaguely realistic. Bottom line: while the Spaniards no doubt did bad things, that massive death toll stems from something that wasn't specifically or uniquely their doing. If the disease problem hadn't existed, then the death toll would be very small compared to what we see in OTL. In fact, when we look at the number of Native Americans in Latin America, and the degree of mixing of population, and then contrast that with the situation in Anglo-America... well. The impression arises that the Anglos were far, far more thorough in any active extermination efforts. And that the Spanish primarily get the bad rep as "ultra-exterminators" because they were the first guys "on the scene", and thus doing their colonising when the waves of disease burned through the New World.

Naturally, this does not excuse any atrocities that were committed, but it does indicate that the image of Spanish colonialism being uniquely worse than that of other countries is not correct. (And in fact, Spanish colonialism may in certain ways have been marginally "less bad" for Native Americans than Anglo colonialism.)

I believe the new conception is that the diseases disseminated into places such as Mexico, arrived in the far north and south of the continents. Thus, the ‘Anglos’ would not be at fault either, if you give the Spaniards the exception. When the estimates for population in Mexico exceeded 20 million prior to spanish rule and then plummeted to 5~ million during spanish rule, it seems safe to say that there was a greater demographic loss in absolute numbers in the Spanish realms than in Anglo or Gallic realms. The Spanish however did not send the percentages of Europeans needed to replace this declining population in Mexico and the only way they could would be to somehow avoid the reformation and pull populations from Germania.
 
As was pointed out, the Spanish colonized the areas of the Americas which had by far the largest and densest native populations. The death tolls were also exacerbated by colonial policies such as the enslavement (in name or otherwise) of a multitude of native workers forced to do dangerous and deadly work. In colonial Bolivia it's estimated around 8 millions slaves (both Indians and Africans brought over to replace rapidly dying Indian populations) died working in the silver mines. And then there's all the numerous massacres, one Spanish priest describes whole provinces in the Yucatan being practically depopulated to bring "peace". Which is particularly frightening when that priest himself was also guilty of numerous abuses including burning people at the stake but even he considered the behavior of other Spaniards to be beyond the pale.

This is a major point left off often times, the concept of how Spain used the colonial possessions, especially the sections of Bolivia and Peru as a sort of resource stripping operation.
 
I think they're the only civilization in history that significantly decreased global population by killing as many people as they did. If anything, I think they've been whitewashed way too much of late. Killing millions is a-okay so long as you don't discriminate by religion, apparently.
I think the Vikings get a little too romanticized these days, albeit by people who buy into that "warrior culture" nonsense and thinks it made them awesome, rather than the reality that a lot of Scandinavians from a certain time period were pirates who made a living running a massive slave market but aside from being good at piracy weren't too terribly different from everyone else nor innately stronger or tougher.

I think people are confusing "being civilized" with not causing destruction. I know a few civilizations that caused a lot of destruction to various groups in the name of "civilization."

You don't need to be an unsophisticated, blood thirsty and have an undeveloped culture to be destructive. Assuming you have to be lets the "civilized" people off the hook.
 
The victorious North was harsh with the South after the ACW
To be fair, that probably comes out of the areas where Union occupation during the war was rather brutal, such as when union soldiers executed this farmer's son because they (inccorectly) identified him as a confederate.

The farmer went on to be a sniper with over 200 confirmed kills in the Mississippi river valley
 
I think people are confusing "being civilized" with not causing destruction. I know a few civilizations that caused a lot of destruction to various groups in the name of "civilization."

You don't need to be an unsophisticated, blood thirsty and have an undeveloped culture to be destructive. Assuming you have to be lets the "civilized" people off the hook.

No, I certainly understand that "civilization", whatever the hell that means, isn't mutually exclusive with destruction. What I'm saying is that from my perspective, the praise the Mongols get for being tolerant and civilized seems like an attempt to sweep their destruction under the rug, or pretend it was unexceptional compared to their less enlightened contemporaries. To say they didn't deserve their "dark legend" on account of their civilization, as the OP does, misses the point in epic fashion.
 
Those who got that treatment were mostly Ottoman invaders.
yeah, it's important to remember that, for all his brutality and cruelty, Vlad directed that only at his enemies and those of his people, he didn't just impale people for shits and giggles. he was and still is considered a national hero in Romania itself. it's all about perspective, like how Genghis Khan is considered a hero in Mongolia while alot of the world sees him more neutrally while yet others consider him a villain.
 
So if some idiot like Dawkins comes along thinking he's dismantled the entire medieval worldview because "how could there have been days before the Sun was made???", you should know better.
To be fair to the idiot he's more into dismantling modern biblical "fundamentalism" than claiming it's the actual historical mediaeval fundamentalism.
 
I think they're the only civilization in history that significantly decreased global population by killing as many people as they did.

While it is not quite clear how many people they really (as opposite to the legends) killed, the "modern civilization" has a nice score as well: sums up the total losses of WWI, WWII and Soviet communism (and perhaps add Chinese communists and Red Khmers)

If anything, I think they've been whitewashed way too much of late. Killing millions is a-okay so long as you don't discriminate by religion, apparently.

Mongolian "Millions" are anything but proved and most of the XX century killings (many tens of millions) were not religion based but are not considered OK.
 
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