Spanish conquest of the Maya

The Spanish conquest of the Maya was a long series of campaigns by which Spanish conquistadors and their indigenous allies brought the Maya kingdoms of southern Mexico and Central America under the rule of New Spain. It began in the early sixteenth century and is usually considered to have ended in 1697, with the fall of the last independent Maya kingdom. In all, it took close to two centuries.

When Europeans arrived, the Maya were not a single empire but many competing kingdoms and provinces spread across the Yucatán Peninsula, the highlands of Guatemala and the surrounding lowlands. This fragmentation made the conquest slower, since each polity had to be subdued separately. The two sides also fought differently: the Spanish relied on steel, firearms, crossbows and horses, while Maya warriors used spears, bows, stones and obsidian-edged wooden swords, favoured ambushes and placed great value on taking captives.

The first recorded encounter came on 30 July 1502, when Christopher Columbus's brother Bartholomew met a Maya trading canoe off the coast of Honduras. In 1511 survivors of a Spanish shipwreck washed ashore in Yucatán; most were killed, but one, Gonzalo Guerrero, became a war leader among the Maya. Expeditions from Cuba reached the Yucatán coast in 1517 and 1518, and in 1517 Francisco Hernández de Córdoba lost more than half his men in a battle at Champotón. Hernán Cortés touched the coast in 1519 on his way to Mexico.

Epidemics brought by the Europeans, including smallpox, measles and influenza, often spread ahead of the soldiers. Smallpox is thought to have reached the Maya area around 1520. Modern estimates suggest that between a third and a half of the highland Maya died, and in some lowland areas losses were far higher.

In 1524 Pedro de Alvarado, one of Cortés's captains, invaded the Guatemalan highlands with Spanish troops and Mexican allies. After defeating the Kʼicheʼ in battles near Quetzaltenango in February, he captured their rulers, burned them to death and destroyed their capital, Qʼumarkaj. The Kaqchikel first allied with him, but his demands for gold drove them to revolt in August 1524, and they held out until 1530. Chiapas and the remoter highland regions were subdued only gradually over the following decades.

Francisco de Montejo received royal permission to conquer Yucatán in 1526, but his first campaigns, from 1527, failed in the face of determined resistance. His son and namesake returned in the early 1540s, founded Mérida in January 1542 and won the submission of the powerful Xiu lords of Mani. A coordinated rising by eastern provinces in November 1546 was crushed within about four months, completing the conquest of the north. Many Maya fled south into the forests of Petén.

The Itza kingdom, with its island capital Nojpetén on Lake Petén Itzá, stayed independent for more than 150 years after Cortés first passed through in 1525. In 1697 Martín de Urzúa y Arizmendi built an armed boat on the lakeshore, and on 13 March his men stormed the city after a short, bloody fight. The Itza king, Kan Ekʼ, was captured soon after. In the years that followed, disease and war devastated the region; by 1708 central Petén had perhaps a tenth of its 1697 Maya population.

Colonial rule brought heavy labour demands and taxation, resettlement into Spanish-style towns, Catholic missions and new crops and livestock. Many older beliefs nonetheless survived, blended with Catholic practice, and millions of Maya live in the region today.

Our 1500 map shows the Maya city-states before contact, and our 1530 and 1700 maps show New Spain expanding around the Maya lands that remained outside Spanish control.