Spanish conquest of the Maya

Conquistador Pedro de Alvarado led the initial efforts to conquer Guatemala.

The Spanish conquest of the Maya was a long conflict during the time when Spain was taking control of the Americas. The Spanish conquistadors and their allies slowly took over the territory of the Maya and made it part of the Spanish colony called the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The Maya lived in the Maya Region, which is now part of modern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. The conquest started in the early 1500s and ended in 1697.

Before the conquest

Before the conquest, the Maya had many competing kingdoms. Many Spanish explorers saw the Maya as people who needed to be forced to change their beliefs, even though the Maya had a great civilization. The first time the Maya and Europeans met was in 1502, during Christopher Columbus's fourth trip to the Americas, when his brother Bartholomew Columbus met a Maya canoe. More Spanish expeditions came in 1517 and 1519, landing on the Yucatán coast.

The resistance

The conquest of the Maya took a long time because the Maya resisted Spanish rule strongly. The Maya were not united, which made it harder for the Spanish to defeat them. The Spanish and the Maya had very different ways of fighting. The Spanish tried to gather native people into new towns they built, while the Maya preferred to capture prisoners. The Maya often ambushed the Spanish, and in response to Spanish cavalry (soldiers on horses), the highland Maya dug pits and put sharp wooden stakes in them.

The Maya did not want to move to the new towns, so many ran away to places like the forest or joined other groups of Maya who had not been conquered. The Spanish had weapons like crossbows, firearms (including muskets and cannons), and war horses. The Maya fought with weapons like spears, bows and arrows, stones, and wooden swords with sharp obsidian (volcanic glass) blades. They wore padded cotton armor to protect themselves.

Differences in technology and disease

The Maya did not have some important technology that the Spanish had, such as the wheel, horses, iron, steel, and gunpowder. The Maya were also very vulnerable to diseases from Europe, like smallpox, because they had no immunity to them.

The final defeat of the Maya came in 1697, when the last independent kingdom of the Maya, the Itza Maya, was conquered by the Spanish under the leadership of Martín de Urzúa y Arizmendi.