The Itza

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In February of 1697 a Spanish force assembled on the western shore of a lake deep in the forest of what is now northern Guatemala, two hundred thirty-five soldiers and a hundred twenty native laborers under a frontier governor named Martin de Ursua y Arizmendi, and set to building a boat. The lake was wide and the prize was an island near its eastern reach, a town packed with temples that no European army had yet taken. When the vessel was finished — a galley fitted with oars and small cannon — it carried the assault across the water on the morning of 13 March. The defenders met it with a fleet of canoes and were broken by the firepower; the soldiers landed, the king was seized within hours, and the temples on the island were set alight. The place was Nojpeten, capital of the Itza, and with its fall the last independent Maya kingdom ceased to exist — the closing of a story that had begun, on the far northern plain, some seven centuries before.

The Itza were a Maya people, and their name is written across the most famous ruin in the Americas. They are remembered first as wanderers and conquerors, then as the lords of a great northern city, and last as the people who carried the old religion onto a forest island and kept it alive there for generation after generation while the colonial order closed in on every side. The arc runs from migration to metropolis to a long defiant survival; it ends with a date that historians give as the true end of independent civilization in Mesoamerica, more than a century and a half after the larger empires had fallen.

Genealogy: the wanderers who named a city

The Itza enter the record as newcomers in motion. The Yucatec chronicles and the colonial accounts remember them as a lineage out of the southwest — traced by tradition to the Chontal-speaking country of the Gulf coast, the lowland of rivers and trade where Maya and central-Mexican worlds met — who moved north and east in the centuries after the great Classic cities of the southern forest had emptied. They settled along the Caribbean side of the peninsula and then on the dry limestone plain of the north, and there, at a place ringed by sinkhole-springs, they fastened their name to the ground.

That place was Chichen Itza. The name is Yucatec — Chi’ch’e’en Itza, the mouth of the well of the Itza — and it fixes the people to the city as firmly as any deed. The northern plain has no rivers; rain drains straight through the porous rock to a water table that surfaces only where the crust has fallen in to make a cenote, a natural well open to the sky. Whoever held the wells held the means of life, and the Itza held the greatest of them. Under their lordship the city became the dominant power of the Yucatan in the Terminal Classic and into the Postclassic, a metropolis of pyramids, colonnaded halls, and a great ballcourt, its largest sinkhole turned not into a reservoir but into an altar — a doorway sunk into the watery underworld, down which the city sent its offerings.

The island of Flores in Lake Peten Itza, occupying the site of Nojpeten, the Itza capital stormed in 1697. Photo by Rafael Amado Deras, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

The power did not last. By the fourteenth century — tradition fixes the rupture around 1331 — Chichen Itza was abandoned amid the rivalries of the northern lineages, the Itza set against the Cocom and the Xiu, and against pressure from the Mexicanized Putun Maya pushing in from the Gulf. The chronicles attach the fall to a lord remembered as Hunac Ceel and a tangle of war and treachery whose details the colonial record blurs. What is clear in outline is the result: the Itza, dispossessed of their northern seat, turned south again, back toward the forest their ancestors had crossed, and came at last to a long lake in the heart of the lowlands. There, on an island near its eastern shore, they built a new capital. In their own tongue it was Nojpeten — the great island — and the Spanish, hearing the people’s name, would call it Tayasal, a rough rendering of ta Itza, the place of the Itza. The lake still carries the name they gave it: Peten Itza.

This second founding is the hinge of the whole Itza story. They had been city-builders on the open plain, within easy reach of armies and trade roads; now they made their seat where neither could readily come. The forest of the Peten was vast and trackless and deadly to outside expeditions, and the lake itself was a moat. The Itza controlled every canoe upon it. To reach the island a hostile force would have to march for weeks through jungle that killed men by fever and hunger before any battle, and then cross open water under the eyes of the people who owned it. The kingdom of Peten Itza was, by its very ground, built to outlast the conquest of everything around it.

Teaching: the island where the old gods were still served

What the Itza kept on their island was not merely independence but a whole order of worship. The lordship of Nojpeten descended through rulers who bore the title Kan Ek’, and the town they ruled was, by the Spanish accounts that finally described it, a dense Maya capital of the old kind. Some two hundred structures crowded the small island; the streets ran in a fourfold plan, north-south and east-west, dividing the town into quarters held by the ruling lineages. Spanish observers at the end counted twenty-one temples. The largest was a stepped pyramid of nine levels, square at the base and rising in the manner of the great northern monuments — a deliberate echo, on a forest island, of the architecture of Chichen Itza and of Mayapan, the city the Itza had known on the plain.

Inside and atop these temples stood the gods. The colonial reports describe ritual images — which the friars called idols — set in pairs on low benches throughout the town and enshrined at the summits of the temples, the figures of the Maya pantheon served in the old way by their own priests. Here was the sky-and-earth creator Itzamna; here the rain-bringer Chaac, whose downpours the porous country lived and died by; here the feathered serpent Kukulkan, whose name the Itza had carried south from the great pyramid on the plain. The calendar turned as it always had — the ritual count of two hundred sixty days interlocking with the solar year, the long reckoning the Maya kept in their books and on their monuments, the order by which the Maya counted their days. Where the friars had elsewhere thrown down the temples and burned the books and broken the images, on this island the temples still stood, the priests still served, the count still ran. It was, in the most literal sense, the last place on earth where the old Maya religion was practiced in its own temples by its own people, unbroken.

That continuity rested on a refusal, and the refusal had a sacred logic. When Spaniards and friars came to the lake — and over the centuries a few did — the Itza met them with a striking and consistent answer: the time had not yet come. The Maya reckoned history in cycles, the great wheel of the k’atun, the twenty-year periods whose recurring names carried recurring fates; prophecy attached to the turning of the count, and the Itza held that conversion, like any great change, belonged to its appointed cycle and not before. To accept the cross out of season would be to break the order of time itself. So the kingdom received the occasional embassy, traded a little, listened, and declined — not from mere stubbornness, in their own frame, but because the calendar had not yet opened the door.

The most telling episode of that long standoff began as a courtesy. When Hernan Cortes passed through the Peten in 1525, on his grueling march to Honduras, he reached the lake and met the reigning Kan Ek’. He left behind a horse, lamed and exhausted, in the king’s keeping — the first horse the Itza had seen. The animal soon died. The Itza, unsure how to feed a creature they took for a being of power, and grieving its loss, made an image of it in stone and set it among the gods: a seated figure they honored as Tzimin Chac, the thunder-horse, a new deity drawn into the rain-god’s company. Nearly a century later, in 1618, two Franciscans reached the island and found the horse-god still enshrined; one of them, Juan de Orbita, in a fury of zeal smashed the image, and the friars escaped the island only with difficulty. The story is often told for its strangeness, but it shows something exact about the kingdom: a religion still living enough to take a new god into itself, and a people who would absorb a Spanish horse into their pantheon long before they would let a Spanish god displace it.

The political geography of Lake Peten Itza around 1697, Nojpeten at center. Map by Simon Burchell, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Worship on the island carried the gravity that worship had always carried in the Maya world — the conviction that the gods are owed, and owed in kind. The costliest of offerings was blood, given that the world might continue; and the colonial accounts of Nojpeten, like the accounts of the cities before it, record sacrifice among the rites by which the Itza kept their covenant with the powers. The records here are the words of hostile outsiders, the friars and soldiers who saw the island as a fortress of error, and they must be read against that grain. But the underlying logic was the tradition’s own and not a foreign libel: in a world the gods had made and remade, the people owed back to the gods the most precious thing they had, and the temples on the island were the place where that debt was paid. The Itza did not keep the old religion as a relic. They kept it because, within their frame, it was true, and because nothing in the turning of the count had yet told them to let it go.

Reception: the last galley and the long afterlife

The standoff could not hold forever, because the colonial world wanted the road. A Spanish camino real driven through the Peten would join Yucatan to Guatemala, and the independent island sat athwart the route. Through the 1690s the pressure mounted: the Franciscan Andres de Avendano reached Nojpeten in early 1696, pleading the new turning of the calendar as the moment to accept the faith, and came away empty; raids and counter-raids ringed the lake; negotiation failed. Then Ursua built his galley on the western shore and, on 13 March 1697, drove it across the water. The Itza fleet of canoes could not stand against cannon and arquebus. The soldiers stormed the island, took the king Kan Ek’, and put the temples to the torch. The twenty-one shrines came down; the images were destroyed; the town was renamed for a Spanish saint and a Spanish virgin, and would in time be called simply Flores. The date is exact and its weight is large: the conquest of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, had fallen in 1521, and the highlands of the K’iche’ and the cities of the Yucatec north in the decades after. Nojpeten held out a hundred seventy-six years beyond the first of those falls. When it went, the last self-governing native kingdom in the Americas went with it, and the long history of independent Mesoamerican civilization closed on a forest lake.

The island never emptied. Where Nojpeten stood there has been continuous habitation from before the conquest to the present day; the modern town of Flores, capital of the Peten department, sits on the same ground, its streets following the curve of the old island town, its houses rising over the rubble of the temples. From the lakeshore at Santa Elena the view across the water is of a small dense island crowned now by a church where pyramids once stood — the literal stratigraphy of the conquest, the new faith built upon the broken seats of the old gods.

The Itza themselves did not vanish with their kingdom, and this is the part of the story most often missed. They are a living people. Several thousand persons identify as Itza in the Peten today, settled chiefly around the town of San Jose on the northern shore of the same lake their ancestors ruled. What has come closest to dying is not the people but the tongue: the Itza’ language, a Yucatecan Maya language distinct from the speech of the northern peninsula, fell into steep decline through the twentieth century — pressed by Spanish, discouraged and at one point in the 1930s barred from schools — until by recent counts only a few dozen fluent elders remained. Against that loss there is now a deliberate revival, an effort by the community to record the elders, teach the young, and carry the language of the last Maya kingdom forward rather than let it close. The work is uphill and its outcome uncertain, but it is the living edge of a very old continuity: the same people, on the same lake, holding to what is theirs.

It is worth marking, too, what the record of the Itza is made of, because it shapes everything that can be said of them. The Maya wrote real books, but almost all of them were burned in the colonial campaigns against the old religion; the surviving Itza past is reconstructed from a handful of Yucatec codices, from the chronicles the colonized Maya themselves kept in the Latin alphabet, from the accounts of the very friars and soldiers who came to destroy the island, and from the archaeology of the lake. The temples of Nojpeten were thrown down too thoroughly for much to remain above the streets of Flores, and so the kingdom is known largely through the words of its conquerors — a source-distance to keep in view, since the men who described the island had every reason to paint it as a citadel of error rather than the last home of a coherent and ancient faith.

That faith had kept its own time to the end. The same calendar the Itza guarded on their island has, in recent years, been pressed into a foreign prophecy — the much-publicized notion that its long count foretold the end of the world in December 2012. It foretold nothing of the kind. The turning of the thirteenth great cycle was a completion within the count, a new beginning of the wheel, and the Maya themselves carved dates reaching far beyond it; the apocalypse was a modern invention laid over an ancient arithmetic. The Itza had read the count more truly. They held that the moment for surrender of the old order would come only when the cycle appointed it — and they kept their temples standing, and their gods served, until a galley crossed the lake and took the choice from their hands.

For the better part of two centuries after the rest of the Maya world had fallen, on an island ringed by water and forest, the old gods of the Maya were worshipped in their own temples by their own priests. The people who held that ground are still beside the lake, learning again to say its name in their own tongue.

→ Related: Chichen Itza · The Yucatec Maya · The Quiche · Maya Civilization · Popol Vuh · Maya Long Count Calendar · Tikal · Palenque · Caracol · Coba · Kukulkan · Chaac · Itzamna · Ix Chel · Kinich Ahau · Yaxchilan · Bonampak · Divination · Reincarnation