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The Maya

Ancient Mayan Cities

 The Maya

    The history of the peoples of Mesoamerica, the vast region that stretches from Central Mexico southward through Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, begins 60,000 years ago, during the Fourth Ice Age, when great glaciers stretched as far southward as the central United States and there was no tropical climate anywhere on our planet, today’s tropics being only grasslands at that time.  The sea level during this period was much lower and a thousand mile wide land bridge existed between Asia and North America where the Bering Strait is today.  At first travel across the land bridge was impossible due to huge walls of ice, but during the Paleo-Indian Period, from about 20,000 BC-8,000 BC, the climate began to warm, the ice began to melt, and people began to migrate southward into the Americas. 

     The Maya, the oldest civilization in the Northwestern Caribbean and the largest homogenous group of Indians north of Peru, are descendants of the early migrating peoples that crossed the Bering Sea land bridge and wandered south through Canada, the western United States, Central America, and into South America.  Although not the oldest of the great Mesoamerican civilizations, the Maya are generally considered the most brilliant of the classic groups.  The term Maya comes from their word for the Yucatán Peninsula area, the Mayab.  However, similar terms are found throughout history and in various other cultures, perhaps it is just a popular word.  Maya is a Hindu philosophical term meaning origin of the world, or world of illusion, it is also an ancient Sanskrit word with several meanings, great, magic, mind, and mother, and while we've touched the subject of mother, Maya was the name of the Buddha's mother.  In the Vedic classic, The Mahabharata, Maya was the name of a noted astronomer/astrologer/magician/architect, as well as the name of a wandering tribe of navigators.  In ancient Egypt, Maya was the name of King Tut's treasurer and the term Mayet meant universal world order.  And today, our month of May is named after the Roman goddess, Maiea, the Goddess of Spring. 

     The fist settlers in Central America of which there is any physical proof were a group of hunter-gatherers known as the Clovis, named after the site of a find of stone spear tips at Clovis, New Mexico.  The Clovis settled in the central highlands of Guatemala somewhere between 11,000-9,000 BC.  The physical proof, a collection of stone tools and spear tips, is dated to 10,000 BC-9,000 BC, but it is speculated the Clovis had actually been residing in Guatemala for some 1,000-2,000 years prior to that.  A recognizable pattern of settlements have been traced to the Archaic Era (8,000 BC – 2,000 BC), just as mankind was making the shift from hunting to a more agrarian way of life as the ice age was retreating and larger game was rapidly becoming scarce with the warming climate.  This period saw the development and domestication of plants such as corn, peppers, beans, and squash at a time when the Petén, now a rainforest, was an area of savannahs and woodlands.  It is during this period, around 2,000 B.C., that one of the staples of the Mayan diet was created, nixtamil, a flour made from corn and white lime, a minerally enriched flour which would appear in tamales and tortillas throughout the history of Mesoamerica.

     The end of the Archaic Era brought the birth of a tropical jungle climate to Mesoamerica as the Mayan civilization enters what is known as their Pre-Classic Period.  The history of the Mayan civilization is broken down into several time periods, the first being the Pre-Classic Period, from about 2,500 BC - 250 AD.  There has been much discussion over the actual dates for the periods of Mayan history, and if you check several sources you will see different dates.  And as scholars learn more about the Maya they are changing their ideas of the timeline of these periods.  Some archeologists are calling the term Pre-Classic a misnomer suggesting that certain Pre-Classic Mayan societies have been found to have many features attributed to the Classic Period. Some scholars suggest calling the Pre-Classic Period the Formative Period, while others opt to add in a Proto-Classic Period prior to the Classic Period.  But for the most part the periods are: the Pre-Classic Period, which is broken down into the Early Pre-Classic Period (2,000 BC to 1,000 BC), the Middle Pre-Classic Period (1,000 BC-300 BC), and the Late Pre-Classic Period (300 BC-250 AD).  In 250 AD the Maya enter what is called the Classic Period which lasts from 250 AD-900 AD and is split into the Early Classic Period (250 AD-600 AD), and the Late Classic Period (600 AD-900 AD).   The Post Classic Period begins in 900 AD and lasts until the arrival of the Spanish in 1521 AD.

Early Pre-Classic Period: 2,000 BC – 1,000 BC

    The Early Pre-Classic Period saw the birth of agriculture in Mesoamerica.  Evidence of Mayan field burnings (found in lake core sediments) dating back over 2,000 years BC have been discovered in Guatemala’s Petén region. By 2,000 BC, fishing and farming villages were prevalent on Guatemala’s Pacific coast and were the forerunners of the great Mayan civilization which dominated Central America for centuries.  Between 1,500 BC - 1,000 BC, the Olmecs, Mesoamerica’s “mother culture” and the first true civilization in the region, began constructing ceremonial pyramid-like structures in Central America. The Olmecs, whose existence was not discovered until the 1920s, primarily settled along Mexico’s Gulf Coast from Vera Cruz to Tabasco, where the remains of several ceremonial centers have been found.  The earliest Olmec site, their greatest city, is located in the Grijalva Depression in Mexico’s Chiapas state, and was populated sometime around 1,600-1,500 B.C.  San Lorenzo was abandoned around 1,000 B.C. and the Olmec's principal city then became La Venta, an island on Mexico's Gulf Coast  in western Tabasco which flourished from 900-400 B.C.    The first Olmec settlements of record in the Yucatán Peninsula were founded between 1,000-300 B.C., although there is evidence of an earlier inhabitation in some caves in Loltún.  Olmec art has been found along Guatemala’s Pacific Coast as well as at Copán in Honduras, and as far south as El Salvador.  Translated, Olmec means rubber people, and it is the Olmecs who are credited with creating the ball games the Maya so loved, as well as the rubber balls that were employed in those games.    

    The Olmecs considered the jaguar to be of supernatural origin and Olmec artifacts bearing images of a were-jaguar, a cross between a human and a jaguar, have been found scattered throughout Mexico.  Between 1,200 BC – 900 BC, the Olmecs maintained an important political and religious center in the basin of the Río Coatzacoalcos where the three sites known as San Lorenzo are found.   Here the Olmecs constructed the first conduit drainage system in the Americas and carved six immense basalt heads, each measuring 8’-9’ in height and weighing 20-40 tons.  These colossal heads were carved from stones that were found over 50 miles from their present location.  The heads are noted for their distinctly Negroid facial features and appear to be wearing helmets.  Other massive stone heads are thought to have been moved by waterways to La Venta.   As a side note, La Venta appears to have been deliberately destroyed around 400 BC - 300 BC.

     The Olmecs also developed a hieroglyphic writing system, the long-count calendar, a complex religion, and it is also believe that they also understood the concept of zero.  They had considerable influence on the early Mayan culture as the Maya adopted and developed many of the Olmec’s skills.  Their myths and rituals are said to have influenced the Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Aztec cultures.

     There is no clear line as to when the Olmec civilization declined and the Maya appeared on the scene.  The first Maya originated in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula around 2500 BC, migrating from the west led by their earliest leader and deified hero, Itzammá, considered a Sun-God to his people. It is said he led his people in their first migration from the Far East, beyond the ocean, along a path that miraculously opened through the waters. 

Middle Pre-Classic Period: 1,000 BC – 300 BC

     The Middle Pre-Classic Period is marked by the decline of the Olmecs and the growth and spread of the Mayan civilization, particularly in Guatemala’s Petén.  During these years the Maya expanded their commerce with the beginnings of widespread trade as they moved from coastal areas into the interior of Mesoamerica forming small communities with little public architecture.  At this time Mayan farmers in the Petén began settling a series of low rainforest ridges at Tikal, and what may have been the first true Mayan city, Nakbé (meaning “by the road” in the Yucatec Mayan language), was constructed northwest of Tikal and south of El Mirador in the northern Petén.  Tikal’s prominence as a Mayan center did not come about until the Early Classic Period around the same time as Teotihuacan in Mexico, and it was one of several regional centers in the Late Classic Period along with Calakmul, Palenque, and Copán (where rich tombs were created during these years).  Nakbé dominated the Mayan civilization until the focus shifted to El Mirador during the Late Pre-Classic Period, sometime around 100 BC (possibly because of El Mirador’s richer supply of water and more defensible position).  El Mirador’s only competition was Kaminaljuyú, a city built where Guatemala City sits today.  In Belize, the Maya built many powerful cities at Altun Ha, Lubaantun, Lamanai, Exuantunich, Nohmul, Cerros, and the most powerful of all, Caracol.  With her coastline and numerous offshore islands, and her location midway between the Yucatán and Guatemala and Honduras, Belize was an important link in the Mayan economy with major trading centers at Moho Caye, Santa Rita, Ambergris Caye, and Wild Cane Caye.  

Late Pre-Classic Period: 300 BC – 250 AD

    The Late Pre-Classic Period was a busy era of cultural development, the blossoming of writing, and calendrics, and a tremendous growth of the Mayan population.  But the greatest advancements the Maya made were in the area of public architecture and monuments.  The greatest of the Mayan cities, El Mirador, Kaminaljuyú, Río Azúl, El Pilar, and Tikal, all rose to prominence during these years as the Mayan population expanded resulting in greater competition for land.  This led to larger communities, an increased settlement density, and the development of better strategies for organizing and feeding their growing populations.  Mayan kingship came to the forefront in these years and shaped the social history of the Mayan people of the lowlands through the Classic Period and Post Classic Periods.

    Towards the end of the Late Pre-Classic Period, around 250 AD, El Mirador, the greatest city in the Mayan world was abandoned and conjecture as to why is all we have.  Was it disease?  Famine?  Warfare?  Nobody knows for certain but evidence points to a long, dry climatic period.  To the south the Ilopango volcano in El Salvador erupted and covered much of the region in ash forcing the abandonment of Kaminaljuyú around the same time as the decline of El Mirador.  Due to the eruption the Maya’s Pacific trade routes were disrupted and the focus for trade shifted to the north bringing more of a Mexican influence to the cities of the Petén.

Classic Period: 250 AD – 900 AD

          As Mesoamerica enters the Classic Period, the Maya’s greatest period of achievement, when art writing, calendrics, mathematics, astronomy, and religion reached their pinnacle, the Golden Age of Mesoamerica.  This era is defined by the appearance and use of dated monuments (like the stellae that you find at places like Quirigúa) and the great temple pyramids that we see today at ancient cities like El Mirador and Tikal.  This Classic Period architecture is, without a doubt, the most elegant and beautiful of the pre-Columbian world, especially the carvings and reliefs at Palenque in Mexico, and Copán in Honduras.  And it wasn't until the finding of the key to the Mayan language in the 1970s that we learned that Mayan artists signed their works.    

     Either the Maya or the Olmec predecessors independently developed the concept of zero and used a base 20 numbering system occasionally working with sums into the hundreds of millions.  Through their highly developed grasp of mathematics the Mayan calculation of the length of the solar year was superior to that of the Gregorian calendar and their highly accurate astronomical calculations, and their charts of the heavenly bodies, are more advanced than any other civilization using naked-eye observations.  The Mayan calendar began around 3113 BC, even before the Mayan culture existed in its true form, and could measure time well into the future.  The Mayan system of writing, which is often called hieroglyphics for its superficial resemblance to the Egyptian writings (the two systems are NOT related), was actually a combination of phonetic symbols and ideograms, actually syllables rather than a strict alphabet and was able to express all types of thoughts.  The glyphs are read from left to right and from top to bottom in paired columns.

     The Classic Period begins with a second Mayan migration during the Early Classic Period, from 250-600A.D.  This migration, which originated in the west and made its way to the Yucatán around 200 AD, was led by Kukulcán, a priest and teacher who was to become recognized as the founder of the Yucatec Mayan civilization.  Under Kukulcán the people were divided into four tribes, ruled by as many kingly families: the Cocom, Tutul-xiu, Itzá and Chele.  Kukulcán was a member of the Cocom tribe and he established his residence at Mayanspan, which thus became the capital of the Yucatec Mayan world. The Tutul-xiu ruled at Uxmal, the Itzá at Chichen-Itzá, and the Chelé at Izamal.  To the Chele was appointed the hereditary high priesthood, and so their city became the sacred, holy city of the Mayans.  Each provincial king was obliged to spend a part of each year with the monarch at Mayapan, which continued until the eleventh century, when, as the result of a successful revolt, Mayapan was destroyed, and the Yucatec Maya rule passed to the Tutul-xiu at Uxmal (prounounced oosh-mal).  Mayapan was later rebuilt as the capital of the Yucatec Maya and reigned until about the middle of the fifteenth century, when, during a revolt, it was finally destroyed.  The Mayapan monarchy split into nineteen small, independent states, of which eighteen still existed on the Yucatán Peninsula when the Spanish arrived.  As a consequence of this revolt part of the Itzá moved south to the Petén, in Guatemala, where they established a kingdom with their capital and sacred city on Isla Flores in Lago Petén.

     The major cities of the Classic Period were Tikal and Quirigúa in Guatemala, Chichen Itzá, Palenque and Yaxchilán in Mexico, and Copán in Honduras, the southernmost major Mayan city.  For most of this period, the majority of the Mayans population lived in the central lowlands of Mexico and Belize.  Cobá, Muyil, Tulum, Xel-Há, and Tankah on the coast of the Yucatín Peninsula became vital trading centers with links to other cities in the peninsula as well as other Mayan communities in Guatemala’s Petén as well as Campeche on the Gulf of Mexico.  Muyil was in fact linked to the coast by canals that wound their way through the wetlands.  So strong were these links that the architectural styles of the Maya in Quintana Roo was influenced by the styles of the Petén as evidenced by the ruins of Dzibanché, Calakumul, and Tikal.  At this time Northern Belize was part of the flourishing Mayan province of Chactemal, now known as Chetumal, with its capital located at Santa Rita, near Corozal.  To the south was the Dzuluinicob, the land of the foreigners as it was known to the Chactemal Maya.  This southern Mayan province, which controlled the upper Belize River valley, had its capital at Tipú, near Negroman on the Macal River south of San Ignacio.

     The Maya were not a true urban culture, their urban centers, nearly all of which were constructed in the tropical rainforest, were primarily for religious use by the people surrounding them.  The most complex centers were located in Guatemala’s Petén, in fact, the Maya are only one of two civilizations to develop an urban culture in a tropical rainforest.  In the highlands of Guatemala the Mayan culture developed less fully although the highlands are more temperate and the communities located their became the suppliers of the raw materials for the construction of the urban centers.  A tropical rainforest is a difficult place to live and it can only support small groups of humans as a greater amount of area is required to support each person., this encourages population dispersal rather than the concentration necessary to build cities and temples. 

     To the north of the Petén, a city in the highlands of Mexico about thirty miles northeast of where Mexico City stands today, begins to exert her influence upon the Maya to her south.  Teotihuacán, which originated around the time of Christ, was home to some 200,000 people with a dominant, and sometimes violent nature, who spread their influence from Mexico southwards into Honduras and who even rebuilt Kaminaljuyú in Teotihuacán style.  Teotihuacán had a well-defined class structure whose people possessed a knowledge of writing and books, used a bar and dot number system, and had a 260-day sacred calendar.

     In 400 AD, Teotihuacán was the sixth largest city in the world, and 300 years later was deserted.  In 650 AD, a great fire spread through the city devastating many of her communities which preceded a swift decline in population and no reconstruction.  By the time of the arrival of the Aztecs the city was little more than an ancient ruin, full of temples that her people had painted red so as to glow in the Mexican sun.  The Aztecs viewed Teotihuacán as a holy place, where the sun, the moon, and the universe were created, where the Gods met to plan creation.  It was the Aztecs who named the city Teotihuacán, the place where men become Gods, and in some translations, the place where the Gods touch earth.  The original name of the city, and the languages spoken there by the people who built the city, are unknown.  A recent glyph that represents the city has been translated as the place of the precious sacrifice, and the city was also referred to as Tollan (“place of cattails” or the “place where people are thick as reeds”), a name also used centuries later for the Toltec capitol of Tula.  There is archeological evidence that the city was a multi-ethnic place with different quarters where lived the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs, the Maya, and the Nahua (Aztecs).  The Totonacs, a Gulf Coast Mexican people, have always maintained that they built the city, a story later corroborated by the Aztecs.

     The two truly dominant Mayan cultures at this time were centered at Tikal in Guatemala’s Petén, which had aligned itself with Teotihuacán, and Calakmul located in the Campeche region of Mexico.  These two cities dominated the region around the 500 AD and struggled with each other for trading rights which eventually led to open warfare.  Calakmul finally made an alliance with the Maya at Caracol (in present day Belize) and defeated Tikal in 562 AD.  But Tikal was not vanquished forever, and in 695 AD they managed to defeat and overrun Calakmul and once that was done the Mayan culture under Tikal began to flourish as never before with new cities springing up all across Mayan territory, but within a century, by about 750 AD, social and political changes were being felt as trade declined and more and more cities were abandoned.       

     The collapse of Teotihuacán in the 7^th century sent shock waves through the peoples of Mesoamerica as cultural and scientific advancement became mired in what is known as the Middle Classic Hiatus.  Although I am covering the Classic Period in its entirety, it is actually broken up into the Early Classic Period and the Late Classic Periods which are separated by the Middle Classic Hiatus, a period when there was a marked decline in the building and erection of dated monuments, particularly at Tikal.  New kings and warlords strove to make their cities the dominant centers of the Mayan civilization after the loss of the Teotihuacán culture as the Mayan culture flourished despite broad-based internal conflicts and revolts.  It was during this time that the Petén was changing from a grassland to the tropical rainforest it is today.  The Late Classic Period was an era highlighted by the acceleration of the Mayan civilization. 

     By 850 AD, militaristic outsiders had set up their own settlements along the Río Usamacinta on what is today the border between Mexico and Guatemala.  These were the years of the Mayan decline, the end of the Classic Period, and the emergence of the Post-Classic Period which spanned the years from 900 AD until the time of the Spanish Conquest in the 1500s.  At this time some of the Petén Maya fled into nearby Belize and the Yucatán, while most headed south into the Guatemalan highlands to the south.  These areas were made up of many fragmented groups of Maya and strife and disorder was rampant in the numerous small, scattered Mayan settlements. 

     Other Mayan cities such as Cobá, Muyil, Tulum, Xel-Há and Tankah flourished during the Classic Period and became important trading centers with links to cities in the Yucatan, the Petén, and Campeche. These links were so strong that they even transformed the area’s architectural style which is clearly influenced by that of the Petén.

       During the Late Classic Period, from 600-950A.D., the Mayan civilization began to fall apart due to several factors, the most notable being an increase in conflict, which was most likely due to competition over natural resources.  The years after 700 A. D. are often called the Terminal Classic Period and is marked by the rapid growth of the Mayan cities in the Yucatán, and after 900 A.D.,  the abandonment of the southern lowland cities.  Tikal was deserted in the 9th century (nearby El Pilar never made into the Post-Classic Period), while the more residential areas followed shortly thereafter, yet it is during this period that Chichen Itzá flourishes in the Yucatán.

Post-Classic Period: 900 AD – 1521 AD

     The Post-Classic Period is the era of the decline of the Mayan civilization, the most decadent, degenerated, and militaristic period in the history of the Maya, and the period ends with the arrival of the Spanish.  During this period the hub of Mayan cultural development moved north from the Maya lowlands in Guatemala and Belize to the Yucatan where the Maya first met the Spanish.  In the Yucatan Peninsula, the Mayan cities there reached their peak during this period with commerce as their driving force.  Mayan traders paddling canoes from Tabasco and Campeche rounded the Yucatán and headed south with goods for trade.

     During the Post Classic Period Tulum and  the inland port of Muyil prospered while Cobá developed into an important regional trading center in the Yucatán, but .by the end of the 1200s, the once-great Mayan cities of Chichen Itzá and Uxmal, which were then inhabited by the Toltec-Maya, were abandoned.  The Toltecs first appeared in Central Mexico in the 10th century AD when they built their capital city of Tula.  The Toltecs are believed to have been refugees from the northern Teotihuacán culture, fleeing its fall in 700 AD.  Little is known of the Toltecs due to the destruction of their city by Aztecs seeking building materials so much of what we do know about them comes from legends handed down by other cultures.  We do know that the Toltecs were highly militaristic and used that might to dominate their neighbors and sometime after 1200 AD, the Guatemalan central highlands were invaded by a group of Toltec-Maya which radically altered life in the region.  The highlands had been populated by a peaceful, spiritual group of Maya and the militaristic Toltec-Maya soon set up a series of competing “empires” dominated by the K’iché Maya, who were located in the central highlands and still abound today (you’ll sometimes see K’iche spelled Quiché, this is because the area they settled in is called Quiché; there are many Mayan dialects spoken amongst today’s Maya in Guatemala, but K’iché is the most common, especially along the Río Dulce).  The Toltecs controlled the more dominant tribes such as the K’iché, the Mam, the Kaqchikel, and the Tz’utujil establishing a new hierarchy and bringing with them new gods and a new language that blended with those of the Guatemalan Maya.  Beginning around 1400 AD, the K’iché, under the direction of the Toltec-Maya, began to exert their influence in the area and by the latter part of the 1400s controlled some one million people, completely dominating the once powerful Mam and Kaqchikel.  In 1475, the great K’iché king Cuicab, the man who has been described as the mastermind of the K’iché expansion, passed away and with him went much of the K’iché authority.  Soon, various conquered tribes of Maya began to break away from K’iché control and for the next half-century the various Mayan tribes in Guatemala were locked in constant conflict with one another as their settlements reflected defensive positions as opposed to a setting better suited to an agrarian subsistence. 

     The coming of the Spaniards had been foretold in Mayan prophecies.  It was written that a pale-skinned people from the east who worshipped one God would arrive and catastrophe would soon follow bringing the end of their world.  The death knell for the Mayan empire sounded the day that Columbus, on his fifth voyage to the New World, 1503-1504, encountered some Mayan traders in a canoe southwest of Cuba.  But the first Europeans to actually visit the Yucatán Peninsula were probably Juan Dias de Solis, and Martin Pinzon, former companions of Christopher Columbus, who were shipwrecked on the peninsula in 1511 and held captive by the Maya.  What the Mayan oracles did not prophesize was the coming of one man, Gonzalo Guerrero.  In 1511, a Spanish galleon foundered on Arrecife Alcaranes near Cabo Catoches, north/northeast of Isla Contoy, and twenty people washed ashore.  After two years only two members of the party survived the rigors of life ashore, Guerrero and Friar Jerónimo de Aguilar.  De Aguilar was rescued by Hernán Cortés in 1519, but Guerrero decided to stay with the Maya   Because of his bravery and his skills as a warrior Guerrero won the trust of the chief of Chetumal who made him a nakóm, or captain.  Guerrero married a Mayan noblewoman and adopted the Mayan dress and customs.  Guerrero and his wife had three children, the first mixed race children, mestizos, in Mexico.

     When Spanish soldiers first set foot on the Yucatán Peninsula they found a Mayan civilization, estimated at up to one million people, beset by hardships and at war with itself, but this did not deter the Maya from putting up a fierce resistance to the invaders.  In 1517, a Spanish expedition led by Francisco Hernandez de Córdoba set sail from Cuba in search of slaves and new lands and landed on Isla Mujeres claiming the island for Spain.  Heading for Cabo Catoche the Spaniards experienced the first Mayan resistance, Mayan warriors attacked them and Córdoba himself was killed.  The surviving Spaniards retreated to their boats to return to Cuba where they claimed that the peninsula was rich in gold.  The following years saw more and more expeditions targeting the Yucatán Peninsula starting in 1518 when Juan de Grijalva landed on Isla de Cozumel and viewed the cities of Tulum and Xel-Há from the sea. 

     In 1519, Hernán Cortés, with a fleet of 11 ships and a force of 550 men landed at Isla de Cozumel, a Mayan commercial and religious center, where he rescued Friar Jerónimo de Aguilar.  In 1511, a Spanish galleon foundered on Arrecife Alcaranes near Cabo Catoche, north/northeast of Isla Contoy, and thirteen people washed ashore.  After two years, only two members of the party survived the rigors of life in the Yucatán amid the Maya, Guerrero and Friar Jerónimo de Aguilar, who were kept as slaves by the Maya.  Aguilar was only given field work, but Guerrero, with his knowledge of European war tactics, earned the favor of the chief of the Chetumal Maya, Nacanchán, when he advised him on inter-Mayan conflicts.  When de Aguilar was rescued by Cortés, Guerrero decided to stay with the Maya, he had already married Nacanchán's daughter, and had earned the rank of nakóm, the equivalent of a captain.  Guerrero and his wife had three children, the first mixed race children, mestizos, in Mexico.  Branded a traitor by Cortés, Guerrero is said to have been responsible for Mayan victories against the Spanish at Chetumal and several other battles in the Yucatán.  Nobody really knows what happened to Guerrero but it believed that he died in Honduras fighting the Spanish around 1536.

     In 1521, Cortés eventually north and then west on a journey that would lead him into the Gulf of Mexico to Veracruz and culminate in the conquest of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztecs who were at the height of their thousand-year-old civilization at this time and who, within three years of the arrival of Cortés, were conquered by 500 Spanish Conquistadors and treacherous Indian allies such as La Malinche.  La Malinche was the flip side of the Guerrero betrayal coin.  An Aztec princess from Jalisco, La Malinche was captured in war and eventually given to Cortés.  She had several children with Cortés and help him defeat the Aztecs, explaining which tricks the Aztecs would use and how to counter them.  Cortés rewarded her by abandoning her to return to Spain and marry a high-born Spanish noblewoman. 

     In 1523, Cortés dispatched Pedro de Alvarado to Guatemala to use “minimum force” and to “preach matters concerning our Holy Faith.”  De Alvarado and his army of over 600 soldiers and horsemen engaged a huge K’iché force estimated at 30,000 under the command of Tecún Umán near the deserted Mayan city of Xelajú.  The well-armed warriors of de Alvarado were decimating the Mayan fighters when the battle suddenly ended as de Alvarado killed Tecún Umán in hand-to-hand combat. The K’iché were defeated but the Kaqchikel decided to form an alliance of sorts with the Spanish allowing the Spanish to establish their first base in Guatemala next to the Kaqchikel capital of Iximché   In 1526, the Kaqchikel broke away from their Spanish allies and moved deeper into the mountains and began to wage a guerilla style war forcing the Spanish to move their base to present day Antigua where they established the first capital of Guatemala, Santiago de los Caballeros on St. Cecelia’s Day, November 22, 1527. 

     De Alvarado’s army continued to fight battle after battle with the highland Maya but the Spaniards never gained control over the more remote regions.  In 1537, the Church stepped in and succeeded where de Alvarado failed.  Missionaries under the guidance of Bartolemé de las Casas convinced the renegade Maya to accept both Christianity and Spanish sovereignty and by 1540 the last of the highland Maya were brought under Spanish control.  Years later de Alvarado, who had controlled Guatemala like his personal fiefdom, enslaving and abusing the Maya and turning their lands into Spanish estates, was killed beneath a rolling horse during a battle in Mexico. 

     Unlike the Aztecs, the conquest of the Maya was not such an easy task, they had no centralized government whose fall would be the end of the conflict, in fact, so scattered were the communities that the Spaniards were sometimes able to turn one group of Indian against another.  However, when it came to the Spanish, the Mayan warriors put up a fierce resistance, but despite their valiant struggle, the superior weaponry of the Spaniards, combined with their ability to attack on horseback, proved too much to overcome even though it took the Spaniards until 1546 to finally gain control over the peninsula.  On December 8, 1526, Francisco de Montejo was put in charge of a military force set to conquer the Maya and colonize the Yucatán Peninsula.  In October of 1527, Montejo and his men landed on the coast in an area where the Maya were friendly to the Spaniards, so friendly that the Maya even helped the invaders build thatched-roof huts.  Montejo’s settlement was called Salamanca de Xel-Há and was short-lived as the Spanish fell victim to tropical disease.  Before long Montejo returned to the Yucatán Peninsula at Campeche where he headed inland to the north leaving his son, known as El Mozo, in charge of the garrison at Campeche.  Another of Montejo’s officers, Alonso Davila, headed for Quintana Roo in search of gold in 1531, and finding none arrived in Chetumal only to find the city in ruins.  The Maya, upon learning of Davila’s approach, torched the great city before fleeing into the jungle to return time and time again over the next 18 months in guerilla raids against Davila’s men, finally forcing the Spaniards to retreat from Chetumal.

     Several more years passed until the Spaniards again returned to Quintana Roo fully bent on conquest.  Gaspar Pachero, and his son Melchor, landed on the peninsula in 1544 and found a Maya civilization debilitated by disease and drought and split into two rival groups making conquest by the Spaniards that much easier.  Savagely fighting their way to Bacalar, the father and son founded Salamanc de Bacalar, but the poverty and desolation of the area forced many colonists to abandon Bacalar and return to Mérida.

     The Spaniards, victorious at last, divided the Yucatán into landholdings called encomiendas that they seized as “spoils of war”.  The conquerors became the new masters as colonial plantations sprang up throughout the region and the Maya were forced to labor for the estates (haciendas) planting and harvesting cacao, cotton, and tropical hardwoods as well as gathering honey and beeswax, all for export.  The Maya were enslaved and treated harshly, but their spirit was not broken, which led to several uprisings against their colonial masters. The first Mayan rebellion occurred in 1546 in Valladolid and Bacalar, and in later years more revolts occurred from 1639-1761 when an uprising with religious overtones at Jacinto Creek was the forerunner of the Caste War of 1847, which lasted for more than 50 years.

     Inland, resident Franciscan friars had discovered the Maya and were shocked at what they thought to be the work of Satan, body mutilation and human sacrifice in the name of religion.  The friars decided that it was their sacred duty to God to eliminate these blasphemies and bring the surviving Maya to Christianity.  The friars, under the direction of Friar Diego de Landa, destroyed thousands of Mayan idols and de Landa personally manipulated the destruction of 27 codices filled with characters and symbols that he could not understand but took to be the words and drawings of Satan.  The destruction nearly wiped out all traces of Mayan civilization, and today only three codices from that era remain intact, one in Madrid, one in Paris, and one in Dresden.  De Landa did however write a manual for other priests concerning the Mayans, his scribe was the source of much of this information, especially the Mayan alphabet.  The ancient Maya had an extensive written language that was both phonetic and ideographic.  Words were written in hieroglyphs, each picture having its own meaning, and the Maya could arrange these pictures in a form to create words, sentences, and even tell a story.  Unfortunately nobody could make the Mayan alphabet work and the work was ignored for over 4 centuries.  A volume of Maya text was rescued from a library in Berlin when the Russians liberated the city in 1945.  The Russian soldier who rescued the work, a student of languages and a mathematician, struggled for years and finally put the pieces together using the text and de Landa’s alphabet.  But the true key to Mayan languages was not discovered until the 1970s when a group of young linguists at Palenque discovered that the glyphs were actually an alphabet. 

     De Landa was recalled to Spain and spent a year in prison while awaiting word on his guilt or innocence of the charges of “despotic mismanagement”.  Although de Landa can be blamed for the loss of the history of the Maya, he did in fact pen a book in his own defense, Relaciones del as Cosas de Yucatan, which describes daily living in a Mayan village in great detail including the growing and preparation of food, the social structure, and the Mayan priesthood and the sciences including a formula that unlocked some of the secrets to Mayan mathematics and astronomy.  Redemption for the loss of a culture?  Hardly…but it was all that we were left with.  De Landa was eventually cleared of all charges and returned to the Yucatán as a Bishop where he remained until his death in 1579.   

     But not all Catholic missionaries were as hard line as de Linda, in fact de Linda’s replacement while in prison, Bishop Toral, was far more compassionate to the Maya than his infamous predecessor.  Toral was a humanitarian who was appalled by the treatment of the Indians and attempted to make changes to alleviate their suffering.  The Franciscan hierarchy refused to see things Toral’s way and no changes were made until shortly before Toral’s death in 1571 when his changes were implemented in a Royal Cedula that prohibited the Franciscan Friars from shaving heads, flogging the Maya, and keeping prison cells in their monasteries as well as bringing about the release of Indian prisoners.  Many of the Maya were baptized into the Catholic faith and the friars educated the people and did their best to protect them from hacienda owners in search of slaves.

     On September 28, 1821, after three centuries as a Spanish colony, the independent republic of Mexico was born.  But many wealthy hacienda owners in the Yucatán, dissatisfied with their new centralized government and the land reforms that it was imposing upon them, declared their independence from Mexico, and in 1847, with the Mexican government, preoccupied with the Mexican-American War and the hacienda owners still bickering about independence, the Maya became lost in the cracks.  They Maya had suffered for years and nobody cared enough about them to do anything to alleviate their suffering.  A fostering hatred for the ruling class, the blancos, exploded with a fury in 1847 in what has come to be known as the Caste War, a conflict that was to last for seven years and decimate the Mayan people and encourage a further half-century of guerilla encounters.

     The Caste War, so called because of the complex racial levels or castes that the Spanish had developed to differentiate the mixed bloodline of the Mexican people, began as a rebellion in Tepich and quickly spread to Tihosuco, Ichmul, and Sacalaca on the Yucatán-Quintana Roo border.  Showing no mercy to the white landholders, the Mayan goal was to remove them from the Yucatán so that the Mayan people could be free once more.  So fierce were the Mayan warriors, and so successful, that by the Spring of 1848 they had the majority of the blancos trapped inside the cities of Mérida and Campeche.  The blancos appealed for assistance from Spain, France, and the United States but no help came and the mayor of Mérida was within one day of evacuating the city when something quite unexpected occurred.   Historians suggest that the Maya were within a week of driving their foes into the sea when the tide of battle turned almost overnight.  To understand what happened, one must understand the religious significance of the land, and specifically of corn, maize, to the Mayan people.  Within days of victory, the entire Mayan army to a man packed up their belongings and returned to their fields to plant their corn thanks to the appearance of a winged ant.  In Mayan philosophy life and time are cycles, and the cycle at that time indicated it was time to plant their crops.  The Maya knew that the rains would soon come and if their corn, the gift of sustenance from the gods, was not in the ground the gods would be insulted and angry.  Just as the dawn of their victory approached the winged ant made its appearance.  The winged ant, the harbinger of the rains, was a bit early but the Maya still returned to their fields to plant their corn.  Not a very good move from a military standpoint, their return to the fields allowed the entrapped blancos to re-fortify their defenses and send for reinforcements offered by the Mexican government if the landowners would forget their independent views and support a unified Mexico.  Troops from Mexico City and Cuba soon arrived along with 1,000 mercenaries, and it wasn’t long before the Maya found themselves under attack and the lands the blancos had lost were regained and the captured Maya sold as slaves to Cuban plantation owners.   Thousands of the Maya hid in the jungle for decades or fled across the border into British Honduras, now Belize to escape the slavers.  By 1855, the Caste War was officially over and although the government controlled the peninsula, the Mayan rebels fled to the jungles of central Quintana Roo where, with the help of gun-runners from British Honduras, they sustained regular guerilla attacks well into the early 1900s when disease, starvation, and repeating rifles finally put an end to the conflict. 

     After the debacle at Mérida and Campeche the Maya were defeated and demoralized, but certain Mayans resurrected a religious cult that allowed the Mayan to regain their spirit and reorganize, all it took was a “miracle” involving some carvings on a tree, a priest, and a ventriloquist.  In 1850, a mestizo from Peto named José Maria Barrera carved three crosses into the bark of a tree in a community located near the border with present day Belize.  The cult of the Talking Cross dated to a pre-Columbian oracle representing the gods of the four cardinal directions and the symbols of the three crosses supposedly transmitted a message from God that was given to the faithful on October 15, 1850 in a sermon by Juan de la Cruz.  The priest employed a ventriloquist named Manuel Nahuat as the mouthpiece of the crosses to tell the Maya what God wanted them to do.  The community came to be called Chan Santa Cruz, Little Holy Cross, and the inhabitants became known as cruzobs, followers of the cross.   A temple was built to house the crosses that were kept in the inner sanctum called La Gloria.  The community thrived selling timber and dealing in arms and the people that came to Chan Santa Cruz in large numbers rediscovered their self-esteem and began to organize.  Taking advantage of period of poor relations between Campeche and Mérida which ended with Campeche seceding from the state of Yucatán in 1857, the Chan Santa Cruz Indians took the fort at Bacalar which gave them control of the coast from Cabo Catoche in the north to the border with British Honduras.  At first the Indians killed their captives, but beginning around 1858 they began to keep white male prisoners as slaves working in the fields and forests and the women captives as domestic servants or concubines.  The Chan Santa Cruz Indians were in complete control of Quintana Roo for over 40 years as a truce with the Mexican Government was sometimes in effect, sometimes not.  Quintana Roo was isolated, it was not connected by road to the rest of Mexico, which was unified and progressing as a nation and a people, so when President Porfrio Diaz came to power in 1877 he cast his eye on the Yucatán Peninsula.

     In 1892, Mexico and British Honduras signed a peace treaty and arms sales to the Mayans were outlawed.  This did little to put a halt to Mayan hostility and the peninsula remained a dangerous no-man’s land of sorts and the military campaign against the Chan Santa Cruz Indians continued.  In 1898, Payo Obispo, now known as Chetumal, was founded by Lt. Othón P. Blanco and designated the capital of the territory.     

     In 1901, the Mexican army, under the command of General Ignacio Bravo, attacked the Indians and set up a garrison in Quintana Roo that was regularly supplied by a railroad that the army constructed.  Over the ensuing years the army continued to raid Mayan settlements and on November 15, 1902, President Porfrio Diaz made Quintana Roo a territory of the Mexican republic after years of being part of the state of Yucatán.  Although the area was ripe for colonization, President Diaz used the region primarily as a penal colony for years (until this practice was ended after the Revolution) and the government of Mexico had little control over the region until around 1910 when the army began to make inroads in their control of the Mayan population.  During these years the Mexican army continued to raid Mayan settlements until around 1915 when the army left the peninsula to the Maya who refused to submit to the Mexicans.  That same year the region was again declared to be part of the state of Yucatán until 1931 when Quintana Roo was again separated from Yucatán.

     From 1917-1920 hundreds of thousands of Indians died from influenza and smallpox, which had been introduced by the Spanish.  As the older leaders passed away, new Mayan leaders emerged, once such man was General Fransisco May, the headman of Yokdonot-Guardia, the site of the Talking Cross.  May led his troops in skirmishes against the Mexicans for years before seeing the inevitable and demanded, and received, a negotiated settlement with the government.  In 1935 peace officially came to Quintana Roo when the Chan Santa Cruz Indians, under the leadership of General May, signed a formal peace treaty with the government of Mexico.  The Maya were granted land parcels thanks to President Lazaro Cardenas who gave half the usable land in Quintana Roo to the poor.