Itza Mayans

The kingdom matters for three reasons. It was the longest-running failure of Spanish arms in the Americas, and the reasons for that failure are instructive: distance, the absence of anything the colonial economy wanted, the rivalry between two Spanish jurisdictions that each preferred to deny the other the prize, and an Itzá diplomacy that played those rivals against each other for decades while quoting prophecy at missionaries. It was also, for about a century before its fall, one of the best-documented Indigenous states in the Americas — Spanish friars, soldiers and officials left thousands of pages describing its fields, its councils, its temples and its trade, and the Itzá themselves appear in those pages not as passive subjects but as negotiators, litigants and tacticians.

The third reason is the archaeology. Nojpetén, the island capital, lies under the modern town of Flores, and the lake shore is crowded with Postclassic towns — Nixtun-Ch'ich', Ixlú, Zacpetén, Topoxté — that belonged to the Itzá and to their rivals and neighbours. Work since the 1990s has turned a story that rested entirely on Spanish documents into one with pottery, architecture, lidar and lake-bed survey behind it.

At a glance

Where did the Itzá come from?

The name is older than the kingdom. Chichén Itzá, the great city of the northern Yucatán, means something like "at the mouth of the well of the Itzá", and its rulers were remembered as Ah Itzá — "those of the Itzá" — a lineage or a party rather than a nation. Ralph Roys, translating the katun chronicles of the Books of Chilam Balam in 1933, put the difficulty plainly: "It has never been satisfactorily explained just who the Itzá were." The native literature treats them as a people apart, feared and hated and at the same time regarded as holy; it calls them ah nunob, "those who speak our language brokenly", which suggests an elite whose Maya carried an accent.

Chichén Itzá flourished between about AD 900 and 1100, and then stopped building. What ended it is disputed — internal revolt, the failure of its commercial system, the rise of Mayapán — but Maya tradition remembered a war. In Katun 8 Ahau, a twenty-year cycle that fell in the last two decades of the twelfth century, Hunac Ceel, ruler of Mayapán, drove out Chac Xib Chac of Chichén Itzá with the help of Mexican captains and, probably, the lords of Izamal, and the city was depopulated. The Chilam Balam of Maní records it in a formula that compresses politics into ritual: the halach uinic was driven out "because of the treachery of Hunac Ceel", and "it was in Tun 10 of Katun 8 Ahau".

The Itzá went south. That, at least, is the story the Yucatec chronicles tell, and it is the basis for the conventional date of 1194 for the kingdom's foundation — a year inside Katun 8 Ahau rather than a year anyone recorded. The migrants, in this account, crossed the whole base of the peninsula and settled on the lakes of the Petén, where their descendants were still ruling four centuries later. Some versions put the move later, in the 1440s, in the upheaval that followed the fall of Mayapán in 1441; the Yucatec chronicles themselves are late copies of older books, and they order events by katun rather than by year, which allows a margin of a century.

Linguistics gives the migration some support and complicates it. Itza' belongs to the Yucatecan branch of the Maya family, but within that branch it sits closest to Mopan, the language of the eastern Petén and Belize, and not to Yucatec proper. That is what a southern origin, or a long southern residence, would produce. The archaeologists who have worked the lakes tend to accept a movement of Yucatecan-speaking elites into a region that was already Maya and already populated — the survivors of the Classic Maya city-states, in Nicholas Hellmuth's formulation, ruled by "a small élite group of Petén Ytzá who had moved south from Chichén Itzá during the twelfth-thirteenth centuries". That model explains the archaeology better than a folk migration does: the lake country was densely settled before the Itzá arrived, and what changed was the ruling line, the title and the orientation of trade, not the pottery.

Whether the Petén Itzá were the same people as the builders of Chichén is therefore unanswerable as posed. The name travelled, the title travelled, and a claim of descent travelled; genetics and ceramics cannot yet confirm or deny the rest.

Why build a capital on an island?

Lake Petén Itzá is 32 km long, 5 km wide and up to 160 m deep, with no surface outlet — it drains underground, through the limestone. For a Maya state it was a gift: permanent water in a region with a five-month dry season, fish and turtles and waterfowl, and a canoe highway that ran east towards the Belize rivers and north towards the Yucatán. The basin was densely settled farmland, and the Spaniards who saw it described fields of maize and cacao running down to the shore.

The capital sat on a small island near the southern shore, later joined to the mainland by a causeway and now covered by the town of Flores. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who crossed the region with Cortés in 1525, described it from the water: "Tayasal, which is on a small island surrounded by water, and unless they go by canoe they cannot enter it by land; and the houses and shrines were whitened, so that they could be seen from more than two leagues away." That whitewash was a deliberate statement. Towns in the Maya lowlands were normally lost in the forest; a city that shone across the water announced itself to every canoe that came.

Inside, the city was dense. Spanish accounts from 1698 count twenty-one temples, the largest with a square base 16.5 m on a side, nine stepped terraces and a summit shrine full of idols — about half the size of the Castillo at Mayapán, which it resembled. Around it stood palaces and thatched houses, perhaps 200 of them, holding something like 2,000 people. The island was divided into four quarters by two principal streets crossing at the summit, and those quarters were lineage divisions, not mere addresses; the modern street plan of Flores is thought to preserve the arrangement, with the plaza and the church standing where the great pyramid stood. A wall of stone and earth ran along the low ground at the water's edge, thrown up, perhaps, in the last decades when the Itzá felt the Spanish closing in.

The names need sorting out, because three of them are in circulation and they do not mean the same thing. Nojpetén, "great island", is what the city was called by its own king when he spoke to the Spaniards in 1698. Tayasal is a Spanish rendering of ta itzá, "at the place of the Itzá", a name for the surrounding country that got attached to the city by writers who never went there. And the archaeological site now signposted as Tayasal is not the island at all: it is the San Miguel peninsula a few hundred metres north, a large Classic and Postclassic town with plazas, stelae and a long occupation. Visitors who think they are looking at the Itzá capital are looking at its suburb across the water.

That confusion matters because it has distorted the archaeology. The island itself cannot be dug freely — it is a living town with a grid, a sewage system and a departmental government — so most of what is known about Nojpetén as a physical place comes from rescue work. Excavations during water and sewer works in 2003–04 sampled nearly every street and alley and found occupation reaching back to the Middle Preclassic, some 2,500 years before the Spanish arrived, with a major expansion in the Early Classic. The city the Spaniards stormed was thus the last phase of two thousand years of settlement on the same rock. The peninsula site has been dug more thoroughly, and the mission villages founded on it after the conquest — San Miguel from 1702, San Bernabé from about 1710 — have given archaeologists the only excavated mission in the Petén lakes.

What did the Kan Ek' actually rule?

The king's title was Aj Kan Ek', and it was a title rather than a personal name: every Itzá king bore it, because the kan element came down the royal tz'akab and the ek' element down the royal ch'ibal, the two descent groups whose union made a legitimate ruler. The name is older than the Itzá kingdom in the Petén. A king of Motul de San José, just north of the lake, is named as Kan Ek' on Seibal Stela 10, carved in AD 849, which means the title was already attached to this corner of the Maya world in the Classic period. Whether the later Itzá dynasty descended from that line, married into it, or simply appropriated a prestigious name is unknowable; all three have been proposed.

What the Kan Ek' governed is the harder question, and the documents mislead if read quickly. Spanish officials assumed from Cortés onwards that the king of the Itzá was overlord of the whole of central Petén, and negotiated with him accordingly. He was not. The Itzá kingdom was one of three major polities around the lakes, alongside the Kowoj to the east and the Yalain to the south-east, with the Kejache to the north between the lakes and Campeche, and the Mopan, Chinamita, Lakandon Ch'ol and Manche Ch'ol beyond them. Some of these were tributaries, some allies, some enemies; the Yalain alliance was cemented by elite intermarriage, the Kowoj enmity was open warfare.

Even inside the Itzá polity the king's power was mediated. There was a northern province the Spaniards called the Chak'an Itzá, whose lords — AjTut among them — dealt with the Spanish on their own account, sometimes against the king's interest; by 1696 they were in alliance with the Kowoj and at war with Nojpetén. Excavation at Nixtun-Ch'ich' on the western shore has uncovered the civic centre of a Late Postclassic Chak'an community, dominated by two colonnaded halls standing side by side. The excavators read them as popol najoob, council houses, and the pairing as evidence of dual organisation in Chak'an politics; the sculptures of the god Itzamna built into one hall more prominently than the other suggest that one of the two factions was the stronger and advertised its Yucatán connections. That is a picture of collegial, factional, negotiable power, not of an oriental despotism.

Spanish sources also name a high priest, AjK'in Kan Ek', who was a member of the royal lineage and who appears at the fall of the city as a war leader; a nobility of ahauob; and the four quarters of the capital, each with its own lineage head. Tribute came in maize, cacao, cotton cloth, honey, wax, salt and labour, rendered by commoners and by subject towns, and stored against war and famine. The Spaniards counted more than 109 settlements around the lakes, which gives some sense of the density of the polity's core — a lake shore thickly planted with towns a few kilometres apart, each with its own fields and its own shrine, bound to the capital by kin, tribute and ritual.

How did the Itzá live?

The economy rested on maize and cacao, and the cacao was famous. When Cortés met the king on the lake, the canoe that came out to his ship carried birds, fish, tortillas, honey, fruit, "gold, though little", and strings of red shell beads that the Maya valued highly; the same accounts report that the Kan Ek' told Cortés his vassals tended his plantations of cacao trees. Cortés then rode south through country "well planted with chocolate trees and maize", and near the coast found cotton ready for weaving, dried maize on the cob, salt, cacao, chile, beans, turkeys and caged birds. It is one of the fullest pictures we have of a sixteenth-century Maya subsistence economy, and it is a picture of abundance.

The lake supplied fish, turtles and waterfowl; the forest supplied game, honey and wax; the fields supplied maize, beans, squashes, chile, achiote and vanilla; the orchards supplied cacao and fruit. Cotton was spun and woven, and cloth was both clothing and currency. Salt came from the north coast, in cakes, and moved south along the same routes as cacao moved north. The Itzá were canoe people above all: when the Franciscan Andrés de Avendaño reached the lake in 1696, the king came out to meet him with eighty canoes. That fleet was the polity's navy, its transport system and its tax collection rolled into one.

Trade ran on two axes. West and north, the route went through the Kejache country towards Campeche and the Yucatec towns, exchanging cacao, cotton, wax and slaves for salt, iron tools and manufactured goods. East, it ran through Yalain territory to Tipu and the Belize River, and thence to the Caribbean coast, where Spanish and later English traders were taking an interest by the later seventeenth century. The Itzá were brokers on both routes, and their prosperity depended on the buffer peoples who carried the goods. When missions, epidemics and forced resettlement destroyed the Ch'ol towns of the western Petén in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Itzá lost a market and a corridor at once, and the Kejache were reduced to middlemen.

There was one great absence in the economy, and it explains a great deal of the history: there was no gold worth mining and no silver at all. The gift of "gold, though little" is the exception that proves the rule. Spanish America ran on bullion and on the labour that produced it, and the Petén offered neither; there was no encomienda to be granted, no mine to register, no viceregal revenue to be collected. For 170 years the Crown's officials in Mérida and Santiago de los Caballeros knew that the Itzá were there, unbaptised and unsubdued, and did nothing about it, because doing something about it would cost money and return none.

The Itzá fought with bows of dark chulul wood almost as tall as a man, with flint-tipped spears, with two-handed wooden swords edged with obsidian — the same weapon the Mexica called a macuahuitl — and with cotton armour stuffed with salt, which Spanish soldiers admired enough to adopt. They had no firearms until they captured them, and they captured a good many. When the Spanish took the capital, the garrison's inventory listed more than fifty Dutch- and French-made muskets, three light iron cannon, four iron and two bronze pedreros and six bronze esmeriles — the accumulated hardware of a frontier war. A state that could field and absorb that much weaponry across a century of contact was not a relic.

What happened when Cortés crossed the lake?

In 1525, three years after the fall of Tenochtitlan and the Aztec Triple Alliance, Hernán Cortés marched from Mexico to Honduras to deal with a subordinate, Cristóbal de Olid, who had set himself up as an independent lord. The expedition was enormous by Maya standards: about 140 Spanish soldiers, 93 of them mounted, some 3,000 Mexican warriors, 150 horses, a herd of pigs, artillery, and 600 Chontal Maya carriers from Acalan. It crossed the base of the peninsula through country no Spaniard had crossed, and on 13 March 1525 it came out of the forest on the northern shore of Lake Petén Itzá.

The king came down to meet him. Mass was said in his presence, and the Spaniards recorded that he was impressed enough to promise to venerate the cross and destroy his idols. Cortés accepted an invitation to visit the island, crossed with a small party of soldiers while the army went round the lake by land, was received with gifts of gold, cloth and food, and was shown a city of whitewashed houses and temples. What he thought of it privately is not recorded; what he did next is the origin of the most famous story in Itzá history. He left a lame horse behind.

Cortés had horses to spare and a lame one was a burden on the march, so he left the animal with the king, asked that it be looked after, and said he would send for it. The horse died. The Itzá, according to the account the Franciscans heard ninety-three years later, made an image of it in lime and stone, seated on its haunches with its forelegs raised, and began to venerate it as a god of thunder and lightning, calling it Tzimin Chac, "thunder horse". They fed it poultry and meat and offered it bouquets of flowers, "as they were accustomed to do for persons of rank", and it is from this that the story of the horse fed to death by devotion comes.

How much of that is reliable? The outline is solid: the crossing is in Cortés's own fifth letter and in Bernal Díaz, and the lame horse is in the Spanish accounts of the expedition. The elaboration is later and clerical. The name Morzillo for the horse appears first in Villagutierre, writing in 1701, 176 years after the event — "he left his horse Morzillo in the charge of the Itzá" — and the theological gloss, the feeding, the flowers and the identification as a thunder god come from the report Fuensalida and Orbita wrote for their provincial, which Diego López de Cogolludo worked into his history of Yucatán. These are interested witnesses: friars describing a cult they had just destroyed, in order to justify destroying it. The Maya word tzimin was their word for the tapir, the largest land animal they knew, and it was applied to the horse by analogy; whether a thunder deity with a horse's image is the same thing as "horse worship" is a question the sources cannot answer. The likeliest reading is that the Itzá incorporated the animal into an existing cult of thunder and rain, and that the friars' account of a horse-god is a polemical simplification of something more syncretic.

Cortés left the lake and had a far worse time of it than the Itzá had given him. The march south through the Maya Mountains took twelve days to cover 32 km; more than two-thirds of his horses died; the party got lost and was led out by a captured boy. He reached Nito on the coast with a few dozen companions and sailed back to Mexico. The Itzá, who had fed him and sent him on his way, were left alone.

They were left alone for 93 years. The reason is not mysterious. Yucatán itself was not conquered until 1546, and the men who did the conquering had no interest in a swampy interior with no gold; the Franciscans of Yucatán had their hands full with their own province; and the route Cortés took was so bad that nobody wanted to repeat it. The Itzá became, in Spanish imagination, a legend on the far side of the forest: a kingdom of apostates and idolaters, protected by distance and, some said, by the devil.

Why did the Franciscans fail in 1618?

The first serious attempt on the Itzá was made not by soldiers but by two friars. In 1618 Bartolomé de Fuensalida and Juan de Orbita left Mérida with a handful of Christian Maya, funded by a bequest from Martín de Palomar, a former alcalde of Mérida, and travelled east through Bacalar and Tipu and then up through the forest — a journey of six months. The governor had refused to authorise the mission for want of a royal licence, so they went without one. They arrived to find that they were expected: the king had been told they were coming, and sent canoes to bring them across.

What followed was, by the friars' own account, some days of goodwill. The Kan Ek' housed them in a building put up for the purpose, twenty paces from his own; sent drink made of maize and cacao; and listened to their preaching with what his guests took for interest, though he told them that Itzá prophecy said the time for conversion had not yet come. Then Orbita saw the horse.

The idol stood in the middle of one of the temples, and Cogolludo's description, taken from Fuensalida's report, is precise about it: a great idol in the figure of a horse, made of lime and stone, seated on its haunches with its feet drawn under it and its forelegs raised, adored as the god of thunder and called Tzimin Chac. Orbita took a stone, climbed onto the statue and smashed it to pieces. The congregation surged, shouting that the friars had killed their god and must die for it; Fuensalida, according to his own account, calmed them with a sermon, holding up a crucifix and explaining that the image was a beast, no god, like the deer they hunted. They were forgiven. They stayed some days longer, baptised a number of children, and left on good terms.

They came back in 1619, in October, and stayed eighteen days. This time the reception cooled. The Maya priesthood, seeing their influence with the king, worked on his wife, and the king asked the friars to go. Their lodging was surrounded by armed men; they were escorted to a canoe and told not to return. Orbita tried to resist and was knocked unconscious by a warrior. They were put ashore without food or water and walked back to Mérida.

These two men are sometimes described as martyrs of the Petén. They were not martyred. Orbita died in Mérida on 5 August 1629; Fuensalida lived on, and in 1641 made a second attempt, getting as far as the town of Hubelná before an Itzá lord stopped him and sent him back under threat of death. The martyrs of this period are other people, and the confusion arises because three separate episodes have been folded into one.

The first is the death of the Maya catechist Cristóbal Na and others of the 1619 party in the confrontation that ended the mission. The second is the fate of Diego Delgado, a Franciscan who in 1622 joined a military expedition under Captain Francisco de Mirones, quarrelled with the soldiers over their treatment of the Maya, and set off for Nojpetén on his own with eighty Christian Maya from Tipu. The king gave him safe conduct, then had the party seized on the island: the soldiers were sacrificed, their heads displayed on stakes, and Delgado's heart cut out and his body dismembered. The third is the killing of Mirones and his men two years later. On 27 January 1624, an Itzá war party under AjK'in P'ol caught Mirones and his soldiers unarmed in the church at Sakalum and killed them all, binding Mirones and the priest to the posts before cutting out their hearts. The Spanish hunted AjK'in P'ol down, tried him and had him hanged, drawn and quartered, with his head displayed in the towns of the Sierra.

Those killings ended Spanish contact with the Itzá for seventy years. The friars concluded that the Petén could not be converted while the Itzá held the lake; the government concluded that expeditions into the forest were expensive and got people killed. For two generations nothing was done.

Why did the conquest take 170 years?

Distance was the first obstacle and the least interesting. The second was jurisdiction. The Petén lay between two Spanish colonies that had been built from opposite ends and disliked each other: the Captaincy General of Yucatán, governing the peninsula from Mérida and Campeche, and the Captaincy General of Guatemala, governing the highlands from Santiago de los Caballeros. Theoretically the Itzá were Yucatán's problem, since Cortés had approached from the north and the Franciscans had come from Mérida. Practically, the Guatemalans could reach the southern Petén from Verapaz in weeks, while the Yucatecs had to build a road through several hundred kilometres of forest. In 1695 both provinces launched expeditions towards the lake at the same moment, each concealing its plans from the other, and the president of the Audiencia of Guatemala explicitly hoped to arrive first.

The third obstacle was the Itzá themselves, who understood their situation exactly. They cultivated the Yalain as a buffer on the Belize side and the Kejache as a buffer on the Campeche side, recruited neighbours as allies against Spanish columns, and negotiated with whichever Spanish authority was closest while fighting the other. When a Guatemalan column appeared on the savannah south of the lake in April 1695, the Itzá attacked its scouts and skirmished with its patrols, and the column withdrew; when Yucatec diplomacy offered peace, they sent envoys to Mérida. It was a textbook small-state strategy, and it worked for the better part of a century.

The fourth obstacle was the character of Spanish expansion in the region, which was missionary rather than military for most of the seventeenth century. The Dominicans had been given the peaceful conversion of the Ch'ol country in Verapaz and the southern Petén, and they ran it as a protected zone, resistant to soldiers and to other orders. Their method was the reducción: gather the scattered Maya into nucleated towns where they could be counted, catechised and taxed. It worked in Verapaz, where the terrain and the proximity of Spanish garrisons left the Maya no escape; it failed in the lowlands, where a town could be abandoned in a week and its people absorbed into the forest. Farther north, the Franciscans concluded that the Itzá were the root of the problem, since their existence encouraged flight and apostasy, and pressed for a military solution.

The fifth obstacle was money, or the lack of it. A conquest of the Petén promised no bullion, no encomienda revenue and no strategic advantage except a road between Yucatán and Guatemala — which was, in the end, the argument that carried. In 1692 Martín de Ursúa y Arizmendi, a Navarrese lawyer who would become governor of Yucatán, proposed exactly that: a road south from Campeche to the Guatemalan border, with the "reduction" of the independent peoples along it. The Crown approved. The road was the conquest, and the conquest was a road.

What broke the Itzá in 1695 and 1696?

Ursúa took office in December 1694 and began building almost at once. In March 1695 Alonso García de Paredes took fifty soldiers south from Campeche into Kejache country, skirmished with its inhabitants and turned back. In March and April a Guatemalan column under Juan Díaz de Velasco came up from Cahabón with seventy soldiers, a large force of Verapaz archers and four Dominican friars, and got within sight of the lake before its commander, its friars and its guides all concluded that they had neither the strength nor the supplies to fight the Itzá, and withdrew. The two Spanish provinces had each failed separately in the same season.

Then the Itzá made a political mistake, or rather the king made a political move that his own nobility treated as a betrayal. In December 1695 the Kan Ek' sent his nephew AjChan to Mérida to offer peaceful submission to the Spanish Crown. AjChan was baptised on 31 December as Martín Francisco, with Ursúa as his godfather, and the ceremony was a diplomatic triumph for the governor: from the Spanish legal point of view the Itzá were now subjects who had submitted voluntarily, which removed the prohibition on making war on them. What the king wanted is not hard to guess. He was beset by the Kowoj, by his own northern lords and by an uncle who opposed any deal with the Spaniards, and a Spanish alliance offered him backing against all three. His embassy was not a surrender; it was a bid for foreign support in a civil war.

The Franciscans hurried to exploit the opening. Andrés de Avendaño y Loyola, who had already tried and failed to reach the Itzá, arrived at the lake from Tipu in January 1696, was met by the king with eighty canoes, was taken to Nojpetén, and baptised more than 300 children in four days. He then made the argument that mattered to him: the katun 8 Ajaw, a twenty-year cycle beginning in 1696 or 1697, was the appointed time for the Itzá to accept Christianity and the king of Spain. The king, who knew the calendar as well as the friar did, replied that the time was not yet; he asked Avendaño to come back in four months, when the whole kingdom would convert. He also warned him of a plot by a rival faction to kill him, and sent him home by way of Tipu. Avendaño got lost, wandered for a month and nearly died.

The plot was real, and it destroyed the Franciscan position. In February 1696 a Spanish party under Captain Pedro de Zubiaur came up from the road with sixty soldiers, a Franciscan named Buenaventura and a force of Christian Yucatec Maya, expecting to walk into a peaceful submission. They were attacked by some 2,000 Itzá warriors on the lake shore; the Spanish volley killed thirty or forty, but the party was overwhelmed and withdrew to Chuntuki, abandoning prisoners. The two Franciscans were taken to Nojpetén and killed — the high priest later admitted that he had bound them in the shape of a cross and cut out their hearts — and the Spanish prisoners were killed too. In the same year the Kowoj attacked Nojpetén itself, burning nine of its temples before they were driven off; the city rebuilt them, but the war on the lake was now general, Itzá against Kowoj, Chak'an against Nojpetén, everyone against everyone.

This is the point at which the conventional narrative of a Spanish conquest becomes inadequate. The Itzá were not defeated in 1697 by a superior civilisation; they were defeated by a coalition of their own neighbours and subjects, at the end of a war in which they had already lost the loyalty of the northern half of their kingdom and much of their legitimacy.

How did Nojpetén fall?

Ursúa reached the western shore of the lake with his army on 26 February 1697. His force was small — some 235 Spanish soldiers and 120 Maya labourers and auxiliaries — but it was the best-equipped thing ever to come out of the Petén forest, and it included a ship. At Ch'ich' on the shore his men assembled a galeota, a flat-bottomed oar-powered warship with a keel of 14.4 m, twelve oars a side, an iron-screwed rudder and at least five guns, built there in twelve days from timber and fittings brought along the new road from Campeche. Nothing like it had ever floated on Lake Petén Itzá.

For a fortnight the Spaniards and the Itzá watched each other. Small groups of Itzá came into camp out of curiosity and were given trinkets; others shot arrows in the direction of the camp without hitting anyone. On 10 March an embassy came out to the Spanish camp under a white flag: AjChan, the baptised nephew, then Chamach Xulu, ruler of the Yalain, and then the Itzá high priest himself, offering surrender. Ursúa received them courteously and invited the king to visit him three days later — that is, on 13 March. The king did not come. Instead, on the morning of the 13th, the Spaniards saw warriors massing along the shore and canoes putting out across the water.

Ursúa embarked 108 soldiers, two secular priests, five servants, AjChan and an Itzá prisoner on the galeota and rowed east towards the island. Halfway across he met the Itzá fleet: several hundred canoes drawn up in an arc that stretched about 600 m from one shore to the other, blocking the approach. He gave the order to row through them. As the galeota came within range the canoes closed around it and the archers began shooting, and the Spaniards opened fire with the guns and the muskets at point-blank range. The ship kept moving through them, closed on the island and put the soldiers ashore.

The fight was short. The Spanish bombardment did most of the killing; the defenders, packed into a town of thatched houses and wooden shrines, had nowhere to stand. Within hours the survivors abandoned the city and tried to swim for the mainland, and many of them drowned. The Spaniards suffered, by their own account, only minor casualties. Ursúa climbed to the highest point of the island — the platform of the great pyramid — planted his standard and renamed the place Nuestra Señora de los Remedios y San Pablo, Laguna del Itzá. The last independent Maya kingdom in the Americas had fallen in a morning.

Why so fast? Because the political structure that made Nojpetén a capital had already collapsed. The king's authority had been mortgaged to the Spanish in December 1695, his northern lords were in revolt, the Kowoj had burned his temples, the Franciscans had been killed in his own city, and the defence of the island was mounted by a coalition that included men who had just been negotiating surrender. The galeota was decisive against canoes, but it was decisive in a battle the Itzá had already half lost. Kan Ek' himself was captured soon afterwards, with the help of Chamach Xulu of the Yalain, and the Kowoj king and other nobles were taken shortly after.

What became of the Itzá?

The conquest was followed by catastrophe. Ursúa went back to Mérida, leaving a garrison on the island and the king and his family under guard. A Guatemalan relief expedition arrived in 1699 with settlers and with disease, which swept through the garrison and the lake towns. The Itzá king, his son and two cousins were taken to Santiago de los Caballeros; the cousins died on the road, and the last Aj Kan Ek' and his heir spent the rest of their lives under house arrest in the colonial capital.

The survivors were gathered into mission towns around the lake — San José and San Andrés on the north shore from 1702–03, San Miguel and San Bernabé on the Tayasal peninsula, Santa Ana and others to the south — under Dominican and Franciscan supervision. In 1704 the Itzá and Kowoj of the missions rose, and nearly retook Nojpetén; the rising was crushed, its leaders executed, and most of the towns abandoned. By 1708 about 6,000 Maya remained in central Petén; by 1714 a census counted just over 3,000 people in Spanish Petén, including non-Indians. Grant Jones's estimate is that 88 per cent of the lake population died in the first decade of colonial rule, from disease, war and hunger. The figures are uncertain — estimates for the population in 1697 range from 20,000 to 60,000 — but the direction is not.

Colonial Petén was a backwater administered from Guatemala after 1703, with a fortress-prison, the Castillo de Arismendi, finished in 1700, a garrison, a handful of priests and a population that voted with its feet whenever it could. The Itzá who remained were peasants on their own former land, taxed in labour and in kind, and their language retreated with them. San José, on the north shore, became the last town where Itza' was spoken by a majority.

The twentieth century was worse than the seventeenth for the language. In the 1930s the Guatemalan government of Jorge Ubico banned the use of Indigenous languages in the Petén, along with Indigenous dress, as part of a programme of forced assimilation, and two generations grew up speaking only Spanish. By 1986 the Summer Institute of Linguistics could find twelve fluent speakers; later counts give thirty-six, all elderly. The 2002 census recorded 1,983 people identifying as Itzá and 1,094 claiming the language — a figure that measures identity rather than fluency. The Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala now promotes the language and produces school materials, and Itza' is classed as severely endangered rather than extinct.

The name has done better than the language. It survives in the name of the lake, in the title Kan Ek', and in the archaeological signature of a people who rebuilt a state in the forest after the Classic collapse and held it for four centuries. Since 2015 the Proyecto Itza team has been surveying the lake bed for canoe landings and offerings, and the peninsula sites have produced the first excavated mission church in the Petén. The history that used to be read out of Villagutierre's folio is now also being read out of the ground.

How do we know any of this?

The documentary base is unusually rich for an Indigenous American state, and unusually one-sided. The core is Spanish: Cortés's fifth letter of 1526, which describes the crossing; Bernal Díaz's Historia verdadera, written in the 1560s by a participant; the reports of Fuensalida and Orbita, which survive through Diego López de Cogolludo's history of Yucatán; Avendaño's Relación de las entradas que hize a la conversión de los gentiles Ytzaex of 1696, an anxious, observant day-by-day account; the administrative and legal papers generated by the 1695–97 campaigns, now largely in the Archivo General de Indias; and Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor's Historia de la conquista de la provincia de el Itza of 1701, written from those papers by a bureaucrat who never went there, and for two centuries the standard account.

The Maya side is thinner. The Books of Chilam Balam preserve katun histories of Chichén Itzá and Mayapán, including the expulsion of the Itzá, but they survive in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century copies, they are written in Yucatec rather than Itza', and they are theological as much as historical. Nothing written by the Itzá themselves about their own kingdom is known to survive. The Itzá appear in the record mostly as speakers, through interpreters and through the letters they dictated to Spanish officials. The most valuable of these is the diplomacy of 1695, when AjChan's embassy generated a paper trail that lets us see Itzá politics from the inside — factions, marriages, a king balancing between his uncle and the Spaniards.

Archaeology has changed the balance in the last thirty years. The rescue excavations on Flores in 2003–04 established the island's two-thousand-year occupation. Work at Nixtun-Ch'ich' has produced a Preclassic urban grid and a Late Postclassic council house with Itzamna sculptures. Zacpetén has given the Kowoj a material culture — temple assemblages modelled on Mayapán, a defensive wall, a moat — that matches their migration story. Tayasal's peninsula has produced border shrines, and San Bernabé a mission church. Underwater survey since 2015 has begun to find the canoe routes and offerings that the documents describe. None of this yet dates the Itzá arrival, which is the central question the documents cannot settle.

Where the sources fail, they fail badly. Population figures for 1697 range from 20,000 to 60,000 within the same modern authority, and the size of the Itzá force at the fight on the lake shore in 1696 is given as 2,000 in one Spanish account and 10,000 in another. The horse story rests on a friar's report of an idol he had just destroyed, and the "kingdom" itself may be a Spanish category imposed on a confederacy. Even the famous ending needs a qualifier: 1697 ended the last Maya kingdom, not the last Maya resistance, which continued in the Petén and the Lacandon forest for another century and flared again in the Caste War of 1847.

Common myths about the Itzá kingdom

Timeline of the Itzá kingdom

What the map shows next

At 1550 on the map the drawn territory covers the whole lake basin and the forest north of it, from the western Petén to the Belize border — a shape of about 33,000 km², well beyond any frontier the Itzá maintained, and one that reflects Spanish estimates of their influence rather than a surveyed border. The later Maya city-states of Yucatán are already Spanish ground by this date; the Itzá are the last independent polity in the region.

By 1670 on the map the polygon has lost its north-eastern lobe and shrunk to about 22,000 km², which is roughly what happened on the ground as the Kejache corridor and the northern Chak'an towns were drawn into the Spanish orbit. At 1697 on the map the shape is still drawn, though the capital had fallen in March of that year; the map cannot show a conquest that took a morning. Follow the story south and west with Spanish expansion, and east to Belize, where the Yalain and Tipu carried the Itzá trade to the Caribbean.