Fall of the Maya

0:00Have you ever heard the story of the flight from New York to Minneapolis that vanished over Lake Michigan in 1950, or the group of hikers who died under mysterious circumstances, and incident that became known as the Diathlon Pass incident in 1959? Well, on the expedition unknown podcast from Discovery, host Josh Gates travels the world to investigate history's greatest unsolved mysteries, like the stolen objects taken by Nazis during World War II, or the final resting place of the Griffin, the very first ship to explore the Great Lakes. Travel the globe with Josh Gates to see investigate some of humanity's greatest feet and most iconic legends. And because we know you retrospect his love history, we know you'll love this. History, we're the bit of mystery. So travel the world with Josh as he investigates these legendary tales, listen to expedition unknown, wherever you get your podcasts. You've been there, settling in for an evening of TV only to waste half the night scrolling. Enter Fire TV. Entertainment with zero effort required. Fire TV serves up personalized

1:04recommendations from across all your apps. Not sure what to watch? Just tell Alexa Plus what you're in the mood for and she'll pull up the perfect recommendation. Problem solved, stop the scroll, start the show. Find what you're looking for with Fire TV. Subscriptions may be required. It's March 13, 1697 and another remarkable event is about to be uncovered by Ariel, Rebecca and Ali, the retro specters. The island of Flores is nowadays proclaimed by the Guatemalan tourist board to be one of the world's 25 most colorful places, which I presume means it didn't make the top 20. But the events that happened there today in history in 1697 would have been colorful indeed, because it was on this day that the island, then known as Norpertin, capital of the last independent Maya Kingdom, finally fell to an assault by Spanish conquistadors.

2:07Yeah, the 100 also Spanish soldiers were armed with several dozen muskets, presumably passing them one to the other. Nine cannons are various sizes and two Pedroiros are kind of cannon for firing rocks. The Itzer warriors defending Norpertin weren't entirely defenseless. They were armed with ornate spears, swords and bows. The elite warriors wore quilted body armor that was stuffed with densely packed cotton or rock salt. These actually ended up being adopted by many conquistadors. You found them much lighter and easier to move in than European armor. But nonetheless, Spanish firepower did ultimately overpower the defenders, many of whom fled the island city by swimming across to the mainland. Yeah, the Spanish force was led by Maritín de Oresüe Arithmendi, and he had hoped to convince this last and conquered Maya Kingdom of the Itzer, whose capital was this island of Norpertin in a lake in current day Guatemala. To surrender rather than fact, he was like, well, can't we talk this out? And they had responded by refusing to turn up to peace talks A, and then B, massing their troops aggressively towards the Spanish invaders.

3:08And so, Oresüe then launched an assault on the city with just over 100 troops. And they rode this newly constructed galliotto ship towards the island city. And halfway across the lake, they encountered a large fleet of canoes blocking their approach. And he basically, Oresüe just basically said, let's just go straight through them. And after this brief but very intense battle, which resulted in heavy casualties for the Itzer and not too many casualties for the Spanish, the city had fallen. Yes, and this was, as I said in my intro, the last Maya city, but it's not kind of the end of the empire. There's a misconception, I think, with the Maya that they had an empire at all. They didn't. They're an ethnic group who had a civilization across Mesoamerica. So Central America, Belize, Guatemala, Southern Mexico, and had been around for thousands of years. They were spread across this vast region. They were disparate societies. Some of them had monarchy. Some of them had tyrannical rulers. Some of them had something closer to what

4:09we'd see as a democracy. What they had in common was their ethnic heritage. And that's why it had taken so long from, I guess, their world being discovered by the likes of the Spanish to this day with their final city falling. It's because it's not as if you took down one, you took down the whole lot. Yeah, and this particular group, the Itzer, we're living in Paten, a region of dense rainforest and marshland in the north of modern Guatemala. And that was one reason why the Spanish Empire had left them untouched. The other was that they had a reputation for being extremely fierce warriors. But 150 years before this day, Hernán Cortez had marched through the region between conquering Southern Mexico to the north of it, and then much of Guatemala to the south. He'd marched across it one of his officers, Bernal D. F. Castillo, later wrote a memoir in which he described Noviten as a large and impressive settlement, whose quote, houses and temples were covered with white plaster so they could be seen to a vast distance. The largest of those temples was a 54-foot, by 54-foot, nine-tiered pyramid, like those of Chichen Itzer. They were all built on this small island,

5:13so it was a densely built city. It was probably home to about 2,000 people here. It wasn't hugely populated, but it did kind of rule over the surrounding Péterna area. But because of the reputation of the Itzer warriors and the fact that it was just really, really hard to get to, the Spanish kind of conquered around it. And for a long time, didn't even bother visiting, this started to change actually after missionaries began going to Noviten in the early 17th century. And to be fair, they found that they were quite a different people to what they had imagined, because although they came charging in and started aggressively proselytizing and committing serious faux pas, like destroying a venerated horse statue, which was actually modelled on a horse Cortez had left behind a hundred years earlier, the Itzer leaders were extraordinarily patient with them. Eventually they expelled them, but they were unharmed. They just said, please go away and don't come back. But this encouraged the Spanish they thought maybe we overestimated their fighting spirit. But even by the time the Spanish had got there, the Maya civilization had really been in decline for quite a long time and for very complex reasons. It's thought to have reached its real sort of peak during the classical period,

6:18you know, 200 AD to about 900 AD. And that's when they were doing most of the construction of the impressive city states. And it was also the time when they developed a sophisticated writing system and made significant advancements in astronomy and mathematics and so on. But then afterwards came this period of decline that's called the terminal classical period from about 800 to a thousand AD. And there's so many contributing factors including sort of environmental things and soil depletion and agricultural things and just the warring of the different Maya groups. But by the time the Spanish turned up, then there were lots of them and they were still a ferocious adversary for the incoming Spanish conquistadors, but they maybe weren't at the peak of their power. Yeah, I mean initially the Maya lands hadn't been that interesting to the Spanish because they didn't have silver or gold. But then in around about the 1520s, the Spanish realized that the Maya did have a resource they could use in their empire, people to work the land that they were requiring as they went about conquering places.

7:22So they sort of pivoted their technique really from an all-out assault to slashing and burning their land. Yes, if a decade leading up to this day, city state after city state had been falling to the Spanish conquistadors, but not the itzer they had remained untouched. And the Spanish widely believed that the itzer were protected by Satan. They couldn't conceive that they were just a nation that the Spanish couldn't conquer. So in 1622, the Spanish had sent an expedition to the area which was annihilated by Maya warriors. They left zero prisoners and they sacrificed some of the captured Spanish soldiers, you know, live sacrifice ripping the heart out the whole, the whole shebang. But they had a couple of copies of the New Testament might have been worthwhile. They're like, thanks guys. We'll hold on to it. If you don't mind lying on this marble table and bearing your chest. And it wasn't until 1695 that the colonial governor of Yucatan in southern Mexico, as we mentioned Martín do, so he sent a small party of Franciscan monks into pattern with Maya guides. And he had this vision for a road that would link Spanish colonial Mexico and

8:22Guatemala. But that would mean suppressing this last independent Maya state. They actually did receive a pretty warm welcome. And again, they were allowed to baptize hundreds of itzer children, but the king of the itzer Maya can etch. That wasn't actually his name. That was a title. All the kings were called canek, politely but firmly declined their offer to embrace Christianity and Spanish rule. And a few months after the missionaries returned, canek sent a message saying, actually, you know what? The time's right. Well, my kingdom will submit to Spain and the Spanish were like, great, that was easy. They then sent a party of Spanish and native troops to Noppen only to be ambushed by a party of warriors. So by now, the Spanish authorities were engaged in multiple expeditions into the pattern region to crush this final remaining Maya kingdom. Well, after Noppen finally fell, Usua really wasn't that interested in governing this newly acquired territory. And so he delegated control to military officers without adequate military or financial support. And after they had done this act of securing Noppen, Usua just went straight

9:25back to Merida, leaving canek and other high ranking family members as Spanish prisoners in what the town had now been renamed, which was Nuestra Signora de las Remedios y San Pueblo, y San Pablo, which means our Lady of the Remedy and St. Paul. And it just meant that the group that were remaining in what was Noppen were hugely isolated among the still dominant Itzer and co-oge, another Maya group on the mainland. And they faced a very, very precarious situation indeed. But it was called our Lady of Remedy. What could be precarious about that? I mean far from being the remedy, the Spanish also bought smallpox and typhoid foreign diseases which killed a lot of people and they destroyed a lot of the culture there and inscriptions and hieroglyphics. Centuries of Maya culture went up in smoke. But hey, we in the West got tomatoes and chocolates, so you know. But although many of the inhabitants of Noppen escaped, the incursion of the Spanish was ultimately incredibly destructive to the Itzer people. When the

10:27conquistadors marched into Noppen in 1697, the region was home to about 60,000 Maya people. Many of whom were actually refugees from previously conquered regions. Within 10 years an estimated 88% of them were dead, the vast majority due to imported European diseases like smallpox. Yeah, I mean it's astonishing that the Maya culture survived the invasion with all of these terrible consequences that occurred. But basically, you know, several Maya villages sort of got along by enduring and adjusting to the new colonial realities that they'd been kind of saddled with retaining elements of their customs and culture. Yeah, which means as of now there are more than six million Maya descendants living in modern Central America where more than 30 languages stemming from ancient Mayan are still spoken. Or to take Frank's ballroom wisdom version of it in it's always sunny in Philadelphia, the Spaniards banged the Mayans turned them into Mexicans. And so another week of retrospecting ends. But next week begins a day early at Club Retrospectors.

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