Spanish Conquest

The 16th century Spanish encountered thriving city-states like Tulum all over the Yucatan. Trade, exchange, marriage, and war characterized the region that showed great resistance to subjugation by the invaders.

The Beginning

Once the Spanish established their base in northern Yucatan by 1546, they began to impose their views that were so different from the Maya. This was a time of great disruption. The Maya people suffered from

  • the introduction of European diseases
  • the suppression of native religion
  • the conscription of labor

Moreover, the vast majority of Maya documents were destroyed by Spanish religious zealots, creating a huge void of information about this advanced civilization.

The Maya of the Yucatan struggled to maintain their life ways under Spanish rule. The Maya forest garden and milpa strategy, unfamiliar to and unappreciated by the Spanish, was not accepted.

After the conquest of the Yucatan, the Maya Itza kingdom still dominated the southern lowlands, where Tikal once ruled. Hostile to their neighbors and ensconced in the Maya forest, they were able to maintain their independence for nearly two centuries after the Spanish arrived.

Subjugation

By the late 1600s there were few places left to conquer in the region, and the wretched Governor of Yucatan, Martin de Ursua, decided to establish the new Camino Real from Merida to Guatemala and subdue the defensive Itza. This proved very difficult. His troops claimed to be starving, for there was no beef or grain. Yet they record all the foods offered:

At times the Spanish…were "forced" (as the documents put it) to eat such foods as ramón (breadnut, a famine substitute for maize) and even that cost one and a half reales per carga for transport, camote (sweet potato), yuca (manioc), ñame and macal (yams), green plantains, and mamey and sapote fruit.  Although this list may indicate that the Indians persisted in producing a diversity of crops other than grains despite the Spanish attempt to get them to concentrate on maize and beans, and although it may also suggest that a healthy range of foodstuffs was available, the Spanish had culturally defined nutritional standards that hardly made these considerations good news.  From their perspective, life in Petén was hard. —from Forest Society by Norman Schwartz (1990) page 54

His bitter success was achieved in 1697 when he conquered the last Maya kingdom.

The Maya faced many challenges. Yet despite adversities, the Maya still thrived as a forest society.