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Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán
Liberals, The Second Empire, and Maya Revolutionaries, 1855â"1876
By Douglas W. Richmond The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1870-3
CHAPTER 1
A Confrontational Foundation
Yucatecan Conflicts from Antiquity to 1821
Yucatecan history has often been a chronicle of oppression and resistance. Beneath the peninsula's tranquil surface there has always existed a deep current of conflict. Prior to the Hispanic invasion, various Maya kingdoms established control after intratribal friction characterized Yucatecan society. The colonial era raised the level of oppression when the Spanish conquistadors destroyed the Maya monarchies. Between whites and Maya peasants, cultural differences festered as a result of labor demands, excessive taxes, and land seizures. Access to land, water, and labor motivated much of the resistance that ripped through the Yucatecan peninsula up to Mexican independence in 1821 and beyond.
The impressive Maya civilization experienced clashes throughout the Yucatecan peninsula since its beginnings about 1800 BC, along riverbanks in what is now Belize and northern Guatemala. Claims to divinity, the right to tax, labor drafts, military conscription, and the competition for resources led to violent clashes. Any discussion of Yucatán must include consideration of its geography and climate. Fought over since the emergence of the first Maya communities, the Yucatecan peninsula can be considered one immense battlefield—were it not for the beauty of this landscape, its architecture, and its varied cultures. It is located on the eastern coast of Mexico, jutting out to the Gulf of Mexico. Although situated in what many consider the tropics, Yucatán's climate is basically arid and hot. The rainfall increases somewhat as one moves south and reaches its highest levels in very southern areas where rain forests appear. But their swamps become prone to flooding, making large-scale agriculture difficult. The rain falls during a three-month period, after which increasingly arid weather prevails with the driest interlude taking place before the rainy seasons renew in the spring. Coastal areas are also prone to periodic hurricanes, which can devastate entire shorelines.
The land itself differs, with soils not found in the rest of Mexico. A thick layer of limestone forms the bedrock throughout most of Yucatán. On top of this is a thin layer of topsoil. This combination of limestone and topsoil results in rain water passing quickly through both the soil and limestone, which prevents the formation of rivers. In addition, irrigation ditches dug into the limestone rarely hold sufficient water. The thin topsoil made plowing nearly impossible. The land has been described as "the country with the least earth that I have ever seen, since all of it is one living rock." The reporter also states, "I have always thought that when God made Yucatán His original purpose was to use it for Hell. He neglected to give it any water or soil." Water, which seeped through the limestone, flowed through channels deep within the rock, making it very difficult to obtain. Sometimes the roof of a channel would collapse, forming a sinkhole known as a cenote. These became prime sources of water. Additionally, water pools formed on the rock surface. The Maya called them sartejanas, which became additional water sources despite their tendency to evaporate.
Maya leaders in the villages and evolving cities made it possible for most citizens to have access to land and to use productive methods to cultivate crops. Not all the land used was communal or under direct royal control. The pre-Hispanic Maya did not buy and sell property, but one could occupy unused land and claim it. The upper class managed to control the most desirable lands despite not owning the property outright. The nobility instituted composting, terracing, irrigation, and canals that resulted in the production of purified salt, honey, wax, cotton, chocolate, and smoked deer meat. Clashes between different groups became inevitable. The desire for food, slaves, and secure boundaries as well as the shifting nature of agriculture provoked the Maya to engage in large-scale warfare against rival kingdoms. These conflicts also caused the Maya to become an exceedingly aggressive society in a landscape of feuding city-states.
Central to understanding the Maya conflicts is their religion. As did the ancient Greeks and Aztecs, the Maya worshipped many different gods. Worldly phenomena, such as mountains, rivers, and other parts of the earth that contained spiritual power, became a vital category. Other deities displayed not only human characteristics but also animal ones. These gods could be capricious as well as benevolent. Therefore, the Maya sought to satisfy them as part of a circular relationship between themselves, nature, and the deities. Thus Maya religion often became ritualized in the form of oppressive ceremonies in order to please the gods. Priests inspired confidence in these ceremonies by encouraging offerings to the gods.
Pre-Hispanic Day of the Dead ceremonies lessened the fear of death and even promoted a positive attitude toward confronting the end of life. A belief that death is not final often cast it into a comfortable companion. The foundation for Day of the Dead rituals evolved from the traditional Maya practice of ancestor veneration. Placing the remains of family members within a home, field, or orchard demonstrated exclusive ownership of such places and served a decisive role in daily activities, assuring that ancestral spirits could observe domestic life. According to tradition, souls are allowed to return to earth once a year, finding their way to ancestral homes by means of family or friend's foods left on altars or at gravesites. Like the Celts, who celebrated their New Year on November 1, Yucatecans honor the souls of dead children on that date and acknowledge the return of adult spirits on the next day. Maya society also cleans the bones of their ancestors during Day of the Dead festivities. This unusual veneration of death and its constant presence in daily life became oppressive in terms of an inclination toward fatalism and conflict.
The Maya also had a taste for human sacrifice similar to the better-known traditions of the Aztecs. They believed that the world would end if such sacrifices were not performed. Thus human sacrifice became common. A well-known method was removing the heart of the victim using a sharp obsidian knife. In this ceremony, four laymen from the nobility held the legs of the person being sacrificed. Carvings and paintings indicate grotesquely costumed priests pulling the entrails from a bound and apparently living victim. Other violent methods incorporated the use of a large stone or stake, to which the victim would be tied. Decapitation, as well as flaying victims and using their skin as garments, also took place. Hurling bound victims off a cliff also happened. Young females were sometimes drowned in wells, while others were painted blue and shot full of arrows. Although citizens volunteered to sacrifice themselves in these bloody ceremonies, violent military campaigns eventually produced the majority of victims.
Another religious ceremony with violent characteristics was the pok-a-tok ball game. The Maya took this game seriously because it enabled a forum for destroying opposition throughout the peninsula. Participants wearing protective gloves and belts played this game. But the task of hitting a six-inch rubber ball through a hoop twenty to thirty feet in the air was probably a lucky extra point arrangement. The unpleasant reality was that this goal had to be met using only fists, elbows, and buttocks to propel the ball. Scoring became a desperate goal because the losers of the game, particularly during special events, were decapitated and the visitors received the heads of their vanquished opponents. Although the Maya considered ball courts a locus for interaction with the underworld and a recreational activity representing the struggle between evil and benign religious forces, prisoners of war had to play a game in which the outcome had been predetermined. Once the competition ended, which recreated the defeat of a vanquished city-state, the captives had their hearts torn out for blood sacrifice.
During the Classic Maya age, generally accepted as extending from 200 BC to AD 900, various Maya kings ruled as intermediaries between heaven and earth. The system of kingship actually extends back in time more than previously thought. Kings functioned as religious leaders as well as monarchs who controlled their people in war and peace. The monarch became the center of all religious ceremonies and was the only one deemed capable of creating social order by unifying the cosmos. The king interpreted the universe as a "world tree" whose center axis coexisted in heaven, earth, and the underworld, and a horizontal crossbar representing the earth that became materialized in the ruler himself. Kings wore a ceremonial dress proclaiming them to be the world tree. Because monarchs dressed like gods, it often became difficult to determine who was king or god.
For a noble to become a king, a bloodletting ritual was conducted for his accession to the throne. These gory rituals served to unite kingdoms on the path to war with neighbors. Bloodletting required a Maya monarch to draw his own blood for the gods. The Maya drew blood from everywhere on their bodies: their ears, noses, tongues, and genitals. Bloodletting scenes prevail in Maya scriptures. At Yaxchilán, the wife of Shield Jaguar is seen pulling a thorn-lines rope through her tongue. By participating in such ceremonies, kings could see visions of an ancestor or god. The visions the Maya experienced through bloodlettings often became hallucinations caused by massive blood loss and shock. Thus the response of the brain to blood loss caused these hallucinations to appear very real to most participants. These oppressive rituals quickly faded from Maya culture after the Spaniards arrived.
To a certain extent, the Maya monarchs used religion as a pretext for warfare. War thus became an event of ritualistic importance. Often there was a need for captives to be used to entertain the public at the ball games as well as to be sacrificed. The kings needed to prove their worthiness as warriors, collect more tribute, and increase taxation. The monarchs erected monuments based on their conquests, which provided detailed accounts of their victorious military campaigns. An example of this can be found at Yaxchilán, where rulers Shield Jaguar and his son, Bird Jaguar, erected temples emphasizing their triumphs.
In Mayan warfare, it became more important to capture enemy leaders than to kill them on the battlefield. Capturing an opposing king was the strategic goal in Mayan warfare. This objective made sense because the loss of a ruler could often cause the abandonment of a city. Abducted nobles usually faced summary execution. Bitter struggles, such as the violent campaign between Copán and Quiriguá, led to the beheading of vanquished monarchs. When the defeat of mighty Palenque took place, however, its ruler remained on his throne under the watchful eye of the victor. Another example of conflict that appears in the Maya Classic period is the constant Yucatecan problem of external intervention. The most notable example is Teotihuacan's invasion of the powerful Maya realm at Tikal. Teotihuacan became the dominant city of the entire American hemisphere and by AD 350; it was the second largest urban complex in the world. Its enormous market, thriving agriculture, and skilled craftsmen motivated the theocratic rulers to expand their influence into the Maya world. Their emissary was the tough Fire Is Born who, along with Teotihuacan soldiers armed with spears and javelins, conquered Tikal in January 378, and unleashed an offensive that spread throughout the Maya region.
More relevant to future conflicts in the nineteenth century is the invasion of Calakmul, in the current state of Campeche, against Tikal. With a core population of sixty thousand, Calakmul prospered from its strategic access to the Laguna de Términos by means of the Rio Candelaria that fed its irrigation reservoirs. Although Calakmul triumphed in 562, Tikal gradually recovered and a stalemate ensued as both sides secured allies. Finally, in 695, Jasaw Chan K'awiil I of Tikal defeated Calakmul's Lord Jaguar Paw Smoke. Calakmul redirected itself to trade to the north and east. Tikal also lost its momentum as continued warfare signaled the beginning of Maya decline. The last burst of conquest took place when the Mayapán league united the northern and western provinces of Yucatán, including Maní. The eastern and southern provinces ruled themselves in separate polities, specifically the Sotuta and the Cupul.
The Maya civilization began to fade a millennium ago for a variety of reasons. Conflict with nature ultimately brutalized the Maya. Overpopulation and food shortages certainly weakened Maya society. The population reached the limits that its technology could support. A two-hundred-year dry spell, punctuated by three periods of severe drought, played an important role. The mega-drought of the eighth century was three times longer than the Dust Bowl era that lashed US society during the Great Depression. Skeletal remains suggest that malnutrition appeared as the Classic period ended. Moreover, the general health of American Indians apparently had been deteriorating for centuries prior to 1492.
The New World was hardly a wholesome Eden because health hit a downward trajectory long before Columbus arrived. An overburdened agricultural system could not produce sufficient food for a population of three million people. The intrusion of militarized societies also disrupted the Maya. The somewhat more secular outsiders demanded significantly more blood sacrifices. A form of total warfare that resembles World War II began to destroy cities and kill more civilians. The resulting disruption of long-distance trade along overland roads isolated the Yucatecan Maya. A violent peasant revolt could also be considered a factor for the end of Maya civilization. Later ritual activity appears to have excluded the masses. Whatever factors predominated, there is little doubt that the highlands decayed first before the disaster spread to Yucatán. The Maya abandoned the civic core of most southern cities by the tenth century.
Once the Spanish monarchy decided to attack Yucatán, conflict in Maya society became more multidimensional. In many ways the Hispanic assault upon Yucatán became a continuation of the medieval reconquista of Spain. King Carlos V decided to reward Laurent de Gorrevod, a cardinal at Notre Dame until the end of 1530, when he became ambassador of Savoy. Carlos V placed him in charge of church matters in southeastern France and gave him all of Yucatán and Cuba as a fief. The matrix of European society suddenly fell upon the Maya, encouraging more and varied strife.
De Gorrevod failed to make good on his claim to Yucatán, but Spanish conquistadors invaded. From 1511 to 1519, four Spanish expeditions assaulted Yucatán. The first encounter was accidental and involved a shipwreck that Gerónimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero survived to become important participants in the Hispanic triumph over the Aztecs on the Mexican mainland. In 1517, Francisco Hernández de Córdoba's group landed on the northeastern corner of Yucatán with official sanction to explore and trade. After the Spaniards moved down to the southwestern beaches, Maya defenders attacked and fatally wounded Hernández de Córdoba, which forced the Spaniards to return to Cuba. Juan de Grijalva led the third assault, which arrived at Cozumel in 1518. Grijalva followed Hernández de Córdoba's route and fought additional Maya contingents at Campeche. Hernán Cortés led the fourth and largest of these incursions, which included the eventual conqueror of Yucatán, Francisco Montejo the elder. After departing Cozumel, Cortés won a major battle at Tabasco and then proceeded to Tenochtitlán, where he destroyed the Aztec empire. Cortés returned to Yucatán at Laguna de Términos, a 50-mile-long and 20-mile-wide lake in the Bay of Campeche, in 1525, where he secured the allegiance of the Chontal Mayas. Furthermore, Cortés exaggerated the potential wealth of Laguna de Términos to such an extent that Francisco Montejo decided to carry out a thorough conquest of all Yucatán shortly afterward. Collaboration would continue as another factor during the nineteenth century.
Montejo returned to Yucatán in 1527 with royal approval to colonize Yucatán. The Montejo expedition arrived in four ships at Cozumel, where the local Maya ruler, Naum Pat, welcomed them. Montejo eventually had many indigenous collaborators, such as the Chontal and Itzás, who continued old rivalries. The Spanish takeover resulted partially from the lack of a centralized Maya state and the legacy of pre-Hispanic civil wars prior to the arrival of Montejo, who also took advantage of the smallpox epidemic spread by the 1511 Spanish landfall. Like Cortés, Montejo burned his ships in order to discourage his men from returning to Cuba. He need not have bothered because the Maya did not attack him for four months. Montejo drove deep into southeastern Yucatán, arriving at Chetumal. But insufficient resources motivated Montejo to return to Spain, where he prepared for his second expedition of 1531 to 1534.
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Excerpted from Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán by Douglas W. Richmond. Copyright © 2015 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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