In a protracted conflict during the Spanish colonization of the Americas, Spanish colonisers gradually incorporated the territory that became the modern country of Guatemala into the colonial Viceroyalty of New Spain. Before the conquest, this territory contained a number of competing Mesoamerican kingdoms, the majority of which were Maya. Many conquistadors viewed the Maya as "infidels" who needed to be forcefully converted and pacified, disregarding the achievements of their civilization.Jones 2000, p. 356. The first contact between the Maya and European explorers came in the early 16th century when a Spanish ship sailing from Panama to Santo Domingo (Hispaniola) was wrecked on the east coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in 1511. Several Spanish expeditions followed in 1517 and 1519, making landfall on various parts of the Yucatán coast.Jones 2000, pp. 356–358. The Spanish conquest of the Maya was a prolonged affair; the Maya kingdoms resisted integration into the Spanish Empire with such tenacity that their defeat took almost two centuries.Sharer and Traxler 2006, pp. 8, 757.
Pedro de Alvarado arrived in Guatemala from the newly conquered Mexico in early 1524, commanding a mixed force of Spanish conquistadors and native allies, mostly from Tlaxcala and Cholula. Geographic features across Guatemala now bear Nahuatl placenames owing to the influence of these Mexican allies, who translated for the Spanish. The Kaqchikel Maya initially allied themselves with the Spanish, but soon rebelled against excessive demands for tribute and did not finally surrender until 1530. In the meantime the other major highland Maya kingdoms had each been defeated in turn by the Spanish and allied warriors from Mexico and already subjugated Maya kingdoms in Guatemala. The Itza Maya and other lowland groups in the Petén Basin were first contacted by Hernán Cortés in 1525, but remained independent and hostile to the encroaching Spanish until 1697, when a concerted Spanish assault led by Martín de Ursúa y Arizmendi finally defeated the last independent Maya kingdom.
Spanish and native tactics and technology differed greatly. The Spanish viewed the taking of prisoners as a hindrance to outright victory, whereas the Maya prioritised the capture of live prisoners and of booty. The indigenous peoples of Guatemala lacked key elements of Old World technology such as a functional wheel, horses, iron, steel, and gunpowder; they were also extremely susceptible to Old World diseases, against which they had no resistance. The Maya preferred raiding and ambush to large-scale warfare, using spears, arrows and wooden swords with inset obsidian blades; the Xinca of the southern coastal plain used poison on their arrows. In response to the use of Spanish cavalry, the highland Maya took to digging pits and lining them with wooden stakes.
Historical sources
The sources describing the Spanish conquest of Guatemala include those written by the Spanish themselves, among them two of four letters written by conquistador Pedro de Alvarado to Hernán Cortés in 1524, describing the initial campaign to subjugate the Guatemalan Highlands. These letters were despatched to Tenochtitlan, addressed to Cortés but with a royal audience in mind; two of these letters are now lost.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, p. 23. Gonzalo de Alvarado y Chávez was Pedro de Alvarado's cousin; he accompanied him on his first campaign in Guatemala and in 1525 he became the chief constable of Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala, the newly founded Spanish capital. Gonzalo wrote an account that mostly supports that of Pedro de Alvarado. Pedro de Alvarado's brother Jorge wrote another account to the king of Spain that explained it was his own campaign of 1527–1529 that established the Spanish colony.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, p. 49. Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote a lengthy account of the conquest of Mexico and neighbouring regions, the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España ("True History of the Conquest of New Spain"); his account of the conquest of Guatemala generally agrees with that of the Alvarados.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, pp. 49–50. His account was finished around 1568, some 40 years after the campaigns it describes.Díaz del Castillo 1632, 2005, p. 5. Hernán Cortés described his expedition to Honduras in the fifth letter of his Cartas de Relación,Cortés 1844, 2005, p. xxi. in which he details his crossing of what is now Guatemala's Petén Department. Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas wrote a highly critical account of the Spanish conquest of the Americas and included accounts of some incidents in Guatemala.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, p. 50. The Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias ("Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies") was first published in 1552 in Seville.de Las Casas 1552, 1997, p. 13.
The Tlaxcalan allies of the Spanish who accompanied them in their invasion of Guatemala wrote their own accounts of the conquest; these included a letter to the Spanish king protesting at their poor treatment once the campaign was over. Other accounts were in the form of questionnaires answered before colonial magistrates to protest and register a claim for recompense.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, pp. 79–81. Two pictorial accounts painted in the stylised indigenous pictographic tradition have survived; these are the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, which was probably painted in Ciudad Vieja in the 1530s, and the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, painted in Tlaxcala.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, p. 94.
Accounts of the conquest as seen from the point of view of the defeated highland Maya kingdoms are included in a number of indigenous documents, including the Annals of the Kaqchikels, which includes the Xajil Chronicle describing the history of the Kaqchikel from their mythical creation down through the Spanish conquest and continuing to 1619.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, pp. 103–104. A letter from the defeated Tzʼutujil Maya nobility of Santiago Atitlán to the Spanish king written in 1571 details the exploitation of the subjugated peoples.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, p. 111.
Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán was a colonial Guatemalan historian of Spanish descent who wrote La Recordación Florida, also called Historia de Guatemala (History of Guatemala). The book was written in 1690 and is regarded as one of the most important works of Guatemalan history, and is the first such book to have been written by a criollo author.Lara Figueroa 2000, p. 1. Field investigation has tended to support the estimates of indigenous population and army sizes given by Fuentes y Guzmán.Lovell 2005, p. 69.
Background
Christopher Columbus discovered the New World for the Kingdom of Castile and León in 1492. Private adventurers thereafter entered into contracts with the Spanish Crown to conquer the newly discovered lands in return for tax revenues and the power to rule.Feldman 2000, p. xix. In the first decades after the discovery of the new lands, the Spanish colonised the Caribbean and established a centre of operations on the island of Cuba. They heard rumours of the rich empire of the Aztecs on the mainland to the west and, in 1519, Hernán Cortés set sail with eleven ships to explore the Mexican coast.Smith 1996, 2003, p. 272. By August 1521 the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had fallen to the Spanish and their allies.Smith 1996, 2003, p. 276. A single soldier arriving in Mexico in 1520 was carrying smallpox and thus initiated the devastating plagues that swept through the native populations of the Americas.Smith 1996, 2003, p. 279. Within three years of the fall of Tenochtitlan the Spanish had conquered a large part of Mexico, extending as far south as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The newly conquered territory became New Spain, headed by a viceroy who answered to the king of Spain via the Council of the Indies.Coe and Koontz 2002, p. 229. Hernán Cortés received reports of rich, populated lands to the south and dispatched Pedro de Alvarado to investigate the region.Lovell 2005, p. 58.
Preparations In the run-up to the announcement that an invasion force was to be sent to Guatemala, 10,000 Nahua warriors had already been assembled by the Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc to accompany the Spanish expedition. Warriors were ordered to be gathered from each of the Mexica and Tlaxcaltec towns. The native warriors supplied their weapons, including swords, clubs and bows and arrows.Matthew 2012, p. 78. Alvarado's army left Tenochtitlan at the beginning of the dry season, sometime between the second half of November and December 1523. As Alvarado left the Aztec capital, he led about 400 Spanish and approximately 200 Tlaxcalan and Cholulan warriors and 100 Mexica, meeting up with the gathered reinforcements on the way. When the army left the Basin of Mexico, it may have included as many as 20,000 native warriors from various kingdoms, although the exact numbers are disputed.Matthew 2012, p. 79. By the time the army crossed the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the massed native warriors included 800 from Tlaxcala, 400 from Huejotzingo, 1,600 from Tepeaca plus many more from other former Aztec territories. Further Mesoamerican warriors were recruited from the Zapotec and Mixtec provinces, with the addition of more Nahuas from the Aztec garrison in Soconusco.Matthew 2012, p. 80.
Guatemala before the conquest
In the early 16th century the territory that now makes up Guatemala was divided into various competing polities, each locked in continual struggle with its neighbours.Polo Sifontes 1986, p. 14. The most important were the Kʼicheʼ, the Kaqchikel, the Tzʼutujil, the Chajoma,Hill 1998, pp. 229, 233. the Mam, the Poqomam and the Pipil.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, p. 6. All were Maya groups except for the Pipil, who were a Nahua group related to the Aztecs; the Pipil had a number of small city-states along the Pacific coastal plain of southern Guatemala and El Salvador.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, p. 25. The Pipil of Guatemala had their capital at Itzcuintepec.Polo Sifontes 1981, p. 123. The Xinca were another non-Maya group occupying the southeastern Pacific coastal area.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, p. 26. Jiménez 2006, p. 1. n. 1. The Maya had never been unified as a single empire, but by the time the Spanish arrived Maya civilization was thousands of years old and had already seen the rise and fall of great cities.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, p. 4.
On the eve of the conquest the highlands of Guatemala were dominated by several powerful Maya states.Sharer and Traxler 2006, p. 717. In the centuries preceding the arrival of the Spanish the Kʼicheʼ had carved out a small empire covering a large part of the western Guatemalan Highlands and the neighbouring Pacific coastal plain. However, in the late 15th century the Kaqchikel rebelled against their former Kʼicheʼ allies and founded a new kingdom to the southeast with Iximche as its capital. In the decades before the Spanish invasion the Kaqchikel kingdom had been steadily eroding the kingdom of the Kʼicheʼ.Restall and Asselbergs 2007, p. 5. Other highland groups included the Tzʼutujil around Lake Atitlán, the Mam in the western highlands and the Poqomam in the eastern highlands.