Spanish conquest of Yucatán
The Spanish conquest of Yucatán was the campaign undertaken by the Spanish conquistadores against the Late Postclassic Maya states and polities in the Yucatán Peninsula, a vast limestone plain covering south-eastern Mexico, northern Guatemala, and all of Belize. The Spanish conquest of the Yucatán Peninsula was hindered by its politically fragmented state. The Spanish engaged in a strategy of concentrating native populations in newly founded colonial towns. Native resistance to the new nucleated settlements took the form of the flight into inaccessible regions such as the forest or joining neighbouring Maya groups that had not yet submitted to the Spanish. Among the Maya, ambush was a favoured tactic. Spanish weaponry included broadswords, rapiers, lances, pikes, halberds, crossbows, matchlocks, and light artillery. Maya warriors fought with flint-tipped spears, bows and arrows and stones, and wore padded cotton armour to protect themselves. The Spanish introduced a number of Old World diseases previously unknown in the Americas, initiating devastating plagues that swept through the native populations.
Satellite view of the Yucatán Peninsula
European-introduced smallpox devastated the indigenous populations of the Americas
Bartholomew Columbus came across a Yucatec Maya canoe in the Gulf of Honduras
Francisco Hernández de Córdoba
Spanish colonization of the Americas
The Spanish colonization of the Americas began in 1493 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola after the initial 1492 voyage of Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus under license from Queen Isabella I of Castile. These overseas territories of the Spanish Empire were under the jurisdiction of Crown of Castile until the last territory was lost in 1898. Spaniards saw the dense populations of indigenous peoples as an important economic resource and the territory claimed as potentially producing great wealth for individual Spaniards and the crown. Religion played an important role in the Spanish conquest and incorporation of indigenous peoples, bringing them into the Catholic Church peacefully or by force. The crown created civil and religious structures to administer the vast territory. Spanish men and women settled in greatest numbers where there were dense indigenous populations and the existence of valuable resources for extraction.
"The Discovery of America" (Johann Moritz Rugendas)
A 16th-century illustration by Flemish Protestant Theodor de Bry for Las Casas' A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies depicting Taínos fighting back against Spaniards, showing cannibalism and forcing a Spaniard to swallow molten gold.
Theodor de Bry illustration depicting Spanish atrocities during the conquest of Hispaniola. Las Casas wrote about the cruelty of Spanish settlers: "They erected certain Gibbets, large, but low made, so that their feet almost reached the ground, every one of which was so ordered as to bear Thirteen Persons in Honour and Reverence (as they said blasphemously) of our Redeemer and his Twelve Apostles, under which they made a Fire to burn them to Ashes whilst hanging on them"
Bust of Hatuey, who rebelled against the Spanish