Itza people

The Itza are a

The books of Chilam Balam recount the history of the Itza and the demise of their empire at the hands of a band of Mexicanized Putún Maya led by the mercenary king Hunac Ceel, founder of the Cocom dynasty of Mayapan. Hunac Ceel fought the Itzas but was taken captive and was to be sacrificed by being thrown into the cenote of Chichén Itzá. However, he survived the attempted sacrifice, and having spent a night in the water he was able to relate a prophecy of the rain god Chac about the year's coming harvest. Once lord of Mayapan, he orchestrated, aided by sorcery, the destruction of Chichén Itzá.

While part of the story of Hunac Ceel seem to be more mythical than historical, it is generally accepted that the Itza of Chichén Itzá were the eventual losers in a power struggle between the three Yucatecan lineages of the Cocom, the Xiu and the Itzá, all claiming heritage from the Toltecs. And around 1331 archeological remains attest that Chichén Itzá and other Itza dominated sites, for example Isla Cerritos, were abandoned. The fall of these sites was contemporary with a gradual incursion of Mexicanized Putún Maya from Tabasco and central Mexico, and it seems that these were indeed the people who caused the fall of the original Itza state.

In Petén

The Itza then left or were expelled from the Yucatán region and returned south to the Petén Basin region to build the city Nojpetén as their capital. Noj peten means "great island" in Itza'.^[7] The early Spanish accounts referred to it as Tayasal, derived from the Nahuatl tah itza ("place of the Itzá").^[8]

The Itza' were at the height of their territorial expansion when Cortes arrived on the coastal cities of Chakán Putum and Potonchán in 1519. The Itza' empire covered 230,000 square kilometers, organised into 4 main kingdoms, all of which were subordinate to the Itza':

• Northern (Cobox)
• Western (Chontal)
• Eastern (Mopan and Yalain)
• Southern (
  Q'eqchi'
  )

The Nahua princess

In 1523, after the fall of the Aztecs,

The Itza' were the last Maya kingdom to remain independent of the Spanish, and some Spanish priests peacefully visited and preached to the last Itza king as late as 1696. On March 13, 1697, the Itza kingdom finally submitted to Spanish rule, represented by a force led by

• Chichen Itza
• Itza language
• Kukulkan
• Morzillo

Notes

References

• Drew, David (1999) The Lost Chronicles of the Maya Kings, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
  ISBN 0-297-81699-3
• Reina, Ruben E. (Fall 1966). "A Peninsula That May Have Been an Island: Tayasal, Peten, Guatemala" (PDF). Expedition. 9 (1). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
  ISSN 0014-4738
  .
• Rice, Prudence M. (2009a). "The Kowoj in Geopolitical-Ritual Perspective". In Rice, Prudence M.; Rice, Don S. (eds.). The Kowoj: identity, migration, and geopolitics in late postclassic Petén, Guatemala. Boulder, Colorado, US:
  OCLC 225875268
  .
• Schele & Matthews (1999) The Code of Kings: The language of seven sacred Maya temples and tombs, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, New York.
  ISBN 978-0-684-85209-6
  .
• Sharer, Robert J. (1994). The Ancient Maya. Stanford University Press.
  ISBN 0-8047-2130-0
  .
• Weaver, Muriel Porter (1993). The Aztecs, Maya, and Their Predecessors: Archaeology of Mesoamerica (3rd ed.). San Diego: Academic Press.
  ISBN 0-01-263999-0
  .