The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom (review)

The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom. By Grant D. Jones (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998) 568 pp. $65.00 cloth $25.95 paper

In 1697, Spanish troops from Yucatán attacked and occupied the small island capital of the Itzás, located in what is now usually designated as Lake Petén Itzá--the last unconquered Maya kingdom. This conquest came a century and a half after Yucatán to the north and Guatemala to the south had been subjugated, a period in which the Itzás maintained their independence while the Spanish conquerers looked on them as a symbol of satanism and disloyalty. Accounts of the campaign, some of them by Spanish contemporaries, have been available in English for decades. The present author painstakingly resurrects original archival documentation, especially (but not solely) from the Archivo General de Indias in Spain, and makes intelligent and exhaustive use of secondary sources to focus intensively on the period from 1695 to 1704, when the last major flurry of revolt was put down.

This is a narrow field, deeply plowed. The author's background as an anthropologist shows itself in attention to the seventeenth-century distribution of the separable Maya linguistic and cultural groups of the region; to their inter-group rivalries, enmities, and affinities; and to his reconstruction of the lineage system of the Itzá. All of these features had repercussions on the Spanish campaign.

Attention to the native communities, however, is not at the expense of comparable, or even closer attention to, relations among Spaniards--to contacts between the governments of Yucatán and Guatemala, both of which were interested in Itzá pacification; to rivalries between Franciscans and secular clergy in Yucatan, each desiring credit for Itzá conversion; and to infighting between two successive governors of Yucatán, namely, Martín de Ursúa y Arizmendi, appointed to take office in 1698 but serving as interim governor for an interrupted period before that date, and Roque Soberanis y Centeno, titular governor through 1697.

Embroiled in these engrossing Peninsular events, Jones pays scant attention to affairs on a yet broader stage. During the seventeenth century, English freebooters invaded the forests of both eastern Yucatan and the southwestern corner of the Peninsula. Their raids together with rebellious acts of local Maya forced the southeastern Yucatecan colonial villa of Salamanca de Bacalar to relocate northwestward for sixty years. The author's references to Bacalar (168 and elsewhere) imply this displacement but never explain it. Moreover, on the broader scale, the campaign of subjugation, while surely a direct result of Ursúa's personal push for glory and goods, was only one of a number of assertive Yucatecan measures taken to stabilize the provincial hearth and rid it of outsiders--measures that were generally successful by the end of the century, the time that the Itzá capital was seized.

But the broader scale is not the subject of the book. In its more circumscribed area of attention, the work conveys a rich understanding of Spanish machinations and the complexity of responses by natives who both abhorred the Spaniards and had a sophisticated understanding of their aims, gained through more than a century of watchful isolation. The events detailed do not end with the conquering invasion of the forests. In later years, the conquered capital--transferred to control by Guatemala (eventually becoming the Petén center of Flores)--almost died on a drying vine of government neglect, while displaced natives melted into the forest and vented their outrage in revolt. A more conclusive Spanish success was finally, if somewhat gradually, achieved in the eighteenth century.

Another result of the author's propensity as an anthropologist may be his adoption of the orthography approved by the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala for the spelling of Mayan words. Though no doubt an improvement in recording and writing, its use results in numerous changes from the common colonial spelling of names and titles and can...