Spanish Conquest of Yucatán
The Spanish took nearly two centuries to conquer the Maya, and the last independent kingdom fell in 1697. The contrast with Mexico and Peru is the point. Cortés destroyed the Aztec state in two years and Pizarro the Inca in one, because both were centralised empires whose capture at the top delivered everything below. The Maya had no such centre. Yucatán in the sixteenth century was divided into some sixteen or seventeen provinces with no overlord, frequently at war with each other, and defeating one delivered nothing except a border with the next. Francisco de Montejo landed in 1527 with a royal licence and spent the next twenty years failing. He was driven out entirely in 1535 after the Maya had learned Spanish tactics, and the peninsula was left alone for a few years. His son and nephew returned and founded Mérida on the ruins of a Maya city in 1542, and the great revolt of 1546 nearly ended that too. What broke the resistance was disease rather than arms: smallpox, measles and typhus arriving repeatedly, along with drought and famine, in a population that may have fallen by ninety per cent over the century. The Itza kingdom at Nojpetén, on an island in a lake in the Petén rainforest, held out until a Spanish force crossed on a galley in March 1697. Maya revolts continued regardless, and the Caste War of Yucatán ran from 1847 into the twentieth century. The other instrument of conquest was the bonfire. Bishop Diego de Landa burned the Maya books at Maní in 1562 along with thousands of images, and four codices survive out of what must have been a library; Landa then wrote the account of Maya writing and custom that scholars used to decipher the script four centuries later.
- Year: 1527 CE
- Category: Military
