1821-1847






Yucatan, 1543-1821



The Spanish conquest of Mexico began with a landing on the Yucatan peninsula, in present-day Quintana Roo. It is here where the Spanish picked up Dona Marina, a person who spoke both Spanish and Nahuatl and provided vital the vital service of translation in Cortes' conquest of the Aztec Empire.
Yucatan itself was Maya country, lowland with a humid climate, tropical rainforest country. It resisted Spanish conquest until into the 1540es, and even after baptism the indigenous Mayas stuck to their pre-christian beliefs, causing the Franciscans, in the 1560es, to apply torture, even the death penalty against those who fell back into revering the old gods.
The DIOCESIS OF YUCATAN was erected in 1518, but in it's early days given up as the proceeding conquest of Mexico focussed the political attention elsewhere. The first bishop to reside in Yucatan, Franciscan FRANCISCO TORAL, arrived in 1562. Administratively, Yucatan (i.e. the modern provinces of TABASCO, CAMPECHE, YUCATAN and QUINTANA ROO, as well as all of BELIZE and the now Guatemaltecan district of PETEN) until 1570 formed part of the CAPTAINCY OF GRACIAS. Then, as the INTENDANCY OF YUCATAN, it was transferred to the VICEROYALTY OF NEW SPAIN. The capital of Yucatan, MERIDA, had been founded in 1542, which also became seat of the Diocesis of Yucatan.
Yucatan lacked silver mines which made Mexico's highland economically so attractive to the Spanish. The disastrous epidemics which have reduced Mexico's highland population by 95 % within a century also affected the Mayan population even worse. Some Mayan cities were overgrown by the jungle, to be rediscovered centuries later. Yucatan became a remote province of New Spain, which received little attention. Spanish settlements (Merida, Campeche, Villahermosa) were of secondary importance.
Mayan resistence continued; the Mayan district of PETEN (modern northern Guatemala) was not subdued until 1697. The rural population still today speaks Mayan, only little Spanish.






EXTERNAL
FILES 		Articles from Catholic Encyclopedia : Yucatan, Archdiocesis of
Yucatan, History of, from New World Adventures (mainly on Spanish attempts to take Yucatan, 1517-1525)
History of Merida, from Yucatan.gob
DOCUMENTS
REFERENCE



This page is part of World History at KMLA
First posted in 2001, last revised on November 5th 2004

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