Itza

The Itza are best known to most people through the ruins of Chichen Itza, the great Yucatan city whose stepped pyramid, astronomically aligned to cast a serpent shaped shadow at the equinoxes, and whose sacred cenote received offerings and, by some accounts, sacrificial victims for generations. Scholars debate how directly the Itza who eventually ruled the city relate to its earlier Puuc-style builders, but by the time Chichen Itza reached its height in the Terminal Classic and Early Postclassic periods, roughly the ninth through eleventh centuries, an Itza dynasty controlled it and dominated much of the northern Yucatan peninsula through alliance and conquest.

Chichen Itza's political power collapsed by the thirteenth century, and Spanish colonial chronicles and Maya sources such as the Books of Chilam Balam describe an Itza migration south into the dense forest of the Peten, where the group settled on and around an island in Lake Peten Itza and built a new capital, Nojpetan, known to the Spanish as Tayasal. This second Itza kingdom preserved a version of the older Yucatec Maya religious and political order for centuries after the rest of the Maya world had fallen under Spanish rule, making it a living continuation of pre-conquest Maya kingship long after that kingship had disappeared everywhere else.

Hernan Cortes himself passed through Nojpetan in 1525 on his overland march to Honduras, and the Itza ruler Kan Ek received him peacefully and reportedly promised eventual conversion, a promise the kingdom spent the following century and a half declining to honor. Spanish friars and soldiers made repeated attempts to bring the Itza under colonial and ecclesiastical control across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Itza met most of these missions with polite deferral, periodic hostility, or the killing of missionaries who pressed too hard, while quietly maintaining their traditional religion, calendar and priesthood behind the buffer of the surrounding Peten jungle. That buffer finally failed in 1697, when the Spanish governor Martin de Ursua led an armed expedition to Lake Peten Itza, built boats, and stormed Nojpetan directly, smashing the temples and idols the Spanish found there and completing the conquest of the last independent Maya kingdom on the same day, March 13, 1697.

The fall of Nojpetan is usually cited as the effective end of the pre-Columbian political order anywhere in the Americas, closing out nearly two centuries in which one Maya kingdom had continued to practice its own religion and answer to its own rulers after every other native state in the hemisphere had already fallen.