Maya Lords and Lordship: The Formation of Colonial Society in Yucatán, 1350-1600

by Sergio Quezada, Terry L. Rugeley (Translator)

Overview

When the Spanish arrived in Yucatán in 1526, they found an established political system based on lordship, a system the Spanish initially integrated into their colonial rule, but ultimately dismantled. In Maya Lords and Lordship, Sergio Quezada builds on the work of earlier scholars and reexamines Yucatec Maya political and social power, arguing that it operated not over territory, as previous scholars assumed, but rather through interpersonal relationships.

The changes to Maya culture imposed by Franciscan friars and Spanish lords worked to unravel the networks of personal ties that had empowered the highest Maya lords, and political power devolved to second-tier Maya lords. By 1600 Spanish rule had fragmented what was left of the interpersonal networks, draining power from the indigenous political structure.

Building on Quezada’s seminal 1993 study, Maya Lords and Lordship offers a fundamentally new vision of Maya political power, challenging the established views of anthropologists and ethnohistorians. Grounded in archival sources as well as historical and ethnographic literature, Quezada’s insights and conclusions will influence studies of the Postclassic and sixteenth-century Maya periods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806144221
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	01/23/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sergio Quezada is a research professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán and a member of the Mexican Academy of History. He has published numerous articles and books on the history of Yucatán and its political organization.


Terry L. Rugeley is Professor Emeritus of Mexican and Latin American History at the University of Oklahoma. He has produced numerous scholarly monographs, translations, and edited collections on the history and culture of southeast Mesoamerica.

Read an Excerpt

Maya Lords and Lordship

The Formation of Colonial Society in Yucatán, 1350â"1600

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By Sergio Quezada, Terry Rugeley

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4422-1

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CHAPTER 1

PERSONAL TIES AND MAYA POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

A broad scholarly consensus attributes our knowledge of Yucatec Maya political organization at the moment of Spanish conquest to the studies of Ralph L. Roys. This author began to outline his thinking in 1933, when he explained the differences between the halach uinic, or "overlord," and the batab, meaning "lord" or "cacique." Roys elaborated his ideas about the political structure of Maya pueblos, or villages, in 1939–1940, and three years later published The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan, his definitive statement on the institutions and social hierarchies that defined peninsular life.

Roys's model held that when the Spanish came to Yucatán, the peninsula was divided into "provinces," each falling into one of three types of political organization. The first was characterized by centralized power personified by the halach uinic, who ruled each of his subordinate pueblos through a batab, or village headman. The second type consisted of a confederation of batabob drawn from the same lineage, a group of individuals with a common ancestor and distinguished by their shared patronymic. Still a third variety consisted of an alliance of batabob, unrelated by lineage, who joined forces to avoid submission to some better-organized neighbors. Roys considered the "prehispanic provinces" to be continuous territories regardless of their style of political integration. He assumed that like modern states, Maya power extended over a specific area at the time of the Spanish invasion, and he tentatively proposed boundaries for these supposed provinces.

Maya scholars of the Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic period have followed suit. Regardless of the type of source they use—whether archaeological record, epigraphic information, anthropological theory, or ethnography—they also begin with the concept of power exercised over continuous territory when propounding models of a regional, unified state composed of well-defined segments or geographic subdivisions. Correlatively, these scholars share the idea that power was exercised by control over spatial territory. One conspicuous example of this way of understanding the relationship between power and territory appears in the 2004 work of Suhler et al. In attempting to determine how far the dominion of Chichén Itzá reached between 900 and 1000 A.D., they write: "Itza territory at this time was marked on the northwest by the trading port of Isla Cerritos, extending along the coast for ca. sixty kilometers to the east. On the eastern interior, the boundary seems to have been in the vicinity of Ichmul de Morley, while the western boundary was probably somewhere east of Izamal.... The initial southern Itza boundary was some unknown distance to the north of Yaxuna, perhaps somewhere near the modern village of Popola, ten kilometers away. With their internal social integration complete and their core polity secure, the Itza set forth on the road to conquest and empire."

Beyond this particular case, innumerable Maya scholars have labored to demonstrate territorial limits by means of graphic representations, while others, more ambitious, have even tried to calculate in square kilometers the territory that a political center dominated. Regardless of the individual author, then, the paradigm of spatially defined power has dominated our understanding of precontact Yucatec Maya society for nearly seventy years.

PERSONAL TIES

Unquestionably, these investigators' proposals and explanations have provided an impressive body of knowledge concerning the historical, political, and cultural developments of the Maya from Pre- to Postclassic times. But they have also unearthed clues for an entirely different perspective: that Maya use of power was more personal than territorial. Indeed, advances in epigraphy demonstrate that hierarchical relations in Maya society were expressed in terms of possession. Then as now, the Maya prefix "u-" signifies "his" or "her." When further identification is necessary, the possessive noun comes last in the phrase. For example, u cahal means "his village," while u cahal Juan means "Juan's village." For that reason, a sahal—a ceremonial office assumed by certain members of the dominant nobility—could become usuhal, or literally, "the noble of," when used to link a specific lord with his king. This way of establishing hierarchical relationships can be seen in the monarchical status of ahau when, by military triumph, family connections, protection, or some asymmetrical alliance, this word changed to u yahau, meaning "king of another king." Both cases point to some form of hierarchical subordination.

The opening generated by this epigraphic study widens when read against Maya sources from the early colonial period. Scholars have traditionally used the term cuchteel exactly as Ralph L. Roys defined it in 1957: that is, to refer to "the smallest organized political unit [which] seems to have been the ward, or barrio, of a town." The dictionaries give its Maya name as "cuchteel." In accordance with this definition, Roys thought that pre-Hispanic pueblos were divided into barrios or districts identified by separate toponyms.

Nevertheless, Okoshi Harada points out that "cuchteel" designated the "functionaries who belonged to the governing body under the command of a batab or cacique." If this interpretation does indeed point toward the idea that political ties among the ruling elites were of a personal and not a territorial nature, then we need to analyze a bit more deeply the nuances of the Maya word "cuchteel" and the context in which it appears in the indigenous documents in order to understand its original meaning.

The word "cuchteel" has four meanings, all with the common denominator of expressing the idea of dependence between persons, but in each case, dependence of a different nature. In one instance "cuchteel" designates an individual subordinated to someone else when the concept of territory does not apply: "subject or vassal under the rule or governance of another." In a second meaning, this subordination has a social quality: "family or people whom one has in his household." The third meaning of cuchteel was roughly equivalent to "parishioner." While this noun bears spatial implications, insofar as a person is bound within a particular parish, we must remember that "parishioner" (feligrés) is also used to describe the worshiper's spiritual subordination to his parish priest. The fourth meaning of "cuchteel" is "parcialidad, part of the pueblo under one's charge." This definition carries a sense of social rather than territorial subordination, since the word "parcialidad" was used to designate "a group of many who form a family," and who, as a group, stood in a dependent relationship to another. Whichever of the four meanings we invoke, the term "cuchteel" expresses the idea of a person or persons hierarchically subordinated to someone else. It does not refer to territory.

Maya scribes used the word "cuchteel," and occasionally its synonym cuchul, to designate one Indian politically subordinated to another, but not to refer to a "barrio." In Maya phrasing, cuchteel appears with its plural suffix (-ob or -oob) and is preceded by the name of a lord, then yetel u (a phrase indicating possession by that lord). In Documento núm. 1, an indigeous-language text brought to light by the seminal Maya linguist Alfredo Barrera Vásquez, we read: "Cacathil in bin yetel in dzin Nachan Pech yetel u kuchteilob." Translated, this reads, "I was accompanied by my younger brother Nachan Pech and his subjects." Similar evidence comes from the Calkiní Codex, a collection of Mayalanguage texts gathered in the late sixteenth century that narrates the history of the Canul and Canché lineages through the Spanish invasion. Here the Maya scribe writes, "u benel tun chacah canul siho yetel u cuchteelob": "Then [Ah] Chacah Canul went to Siho with his subjects."14 So too, in the "Crónica de Chac-Xulub-Chen," a chronicle of the Spanish conquest, Ah Nakuk Pech, the lord of that place, wrote, "Macan Pech, don Pedro Pech, yetel u cuchteelob": "Macan Pech, don Pedro Pech and his subjects."

Multiple factors may have led one Maya to accept another's lordship—or, in the words of friar and linguistic scholar Antonio de Ciudad Real, to decide to become his "vassal." Such factors included protection, kinship, convenience, war, or the simple quest for recognition of a title. In this sense, dependency was constructed from the ground up, and for that reason the tie of subordination did not bind the individual to his lord for life; nor was it hereditary, and it could be made or unmade according to circumstances. The Maya thus used the terms "cuchteel" or "cuchul" to express the lord-vassal relationship, without reference to a territorial designation for one or the other.

It was the Western World, rather than the Mayas themselves, that interpreted that hierarchical bond of lord-vassal as something imposed from the top down, a relationship initially lifelong and eventually hereditary. Observers from the conquistadors onward have failed to conceive of that relationship as jurisdictional. They consistently missed its meaning as "authority, power, or dominion over another"; and instead read it as the "boundary or limit of one place or another in which one's authority is circumscribed." It is this latter meaning that has usually informed our understanding of Maya political organization.

But was this really the Maya way? The idea, derived from both indigenous and Spanish-language colonial sources, that the Maya forged political organization by links based on personal ties opens a new perspective for understanding how a pyramidal network of hierarchical links was constructed from the tenth century onward. However, these same sources are so threadbare, confusing, and contradictory that Mayanists typically accept them when they coincide with material evidence, and reject them when they clash. But, despite the limitations of the evidence, these document sources offer a vision of how a vast network of personal ties could be woven and then unraveled. This vision, in turn, offers us a new way of reconstructing the political history of the Maya of Yucatán's northern lowlands.

THE HEGEMONY OF CHICHÉN ITZÁ

Up to the moment of the Spanish invasion, Maya ruling organization had resulted not from an autonomous evolution, but rather through a process informed by invading groups entering the peninsula during the tenth century. Our ability to reconstruct these invasions is limitedby the chronological lacunas in sources of that period. Nor do those sources always explain the identity and origin of the groups involved. Moreover, archaeological evidence appears to contradict historical information, at times directly. These limitations have generated an intense polemic regarding ethnic origins, the dates of invasions, and the places through which invaders came to Yucatán. Nevertheless, a prevailing concensus holds that from the second half of the ninth century onward, the northern lowlands reveal definitive evidence of conquering groups arriving from "the west."

A certain amount of evidence on this point comes from the traditional accounts incorporated into the various versions of the Book of Chilam Balam, a compilation of Maya-language texts chronicling all phases of the precolonial and colonial Maya history. According to this narrative, a people known as the Itzá conquered Chichén Itzá sometime between 968 and 987 a.d. Later, between 987 and 1007, a group called the Xiu, imposed their rule over Uxmal, and somewhat later, still another group of invaders, known as the Cocom, overwhelmed Mayapán. Once these various new lords cemented their authority, they expropriated the title of halach uinic, or "overlord," in order to legitemize themselves. And, since this was a conquest of men and not of territory, each one sustained his authority through preexisting hierarchies.

Meanwhile, the overlord of the Itzá continued his campaign of conquest. Historical sources tell of how he subjugated all the lords of the peninsula, and how his influence reached as far as Chiapas and Guatemala. By the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, he had already overcome the halach uinicob of Uxmal and Mayapán, and held the rank of ah tepal (sovereign) atop a pyramid of personal relationships. In other words, he ruled with absolute dominion over his vassals—the overlords of Uxmal, Mayapán, and others—and there was no one above him. By means of these campaigns of domination and personal consolidation, Chichén Itzá became the center of all forms of power in the peninsular north, and took the name chuccabal Chichén Itzá: roughly, "Chichén Itzá, conquerer of lordships." Similtaneously, the ah tepal began to organize a complex and state-like command structure to govern Yucatán's northern lowlands.

A similar process transpired with the Cocom and Xiu. When they made their respective conquests of Mayapán and Uxmal, the halach uinic of each center built his state over a preexisting network of personal ties. In this way the halach uinicob of the two centers, now as vassals to another sovereign, maintained their jurisdiction over their subordinate Maya lords. The ah tepal may have elevated some conquered Maya lords to the rank of halach uinic, in the process transferring to them a variety of powers to use over the vassals whom they, in turn, recognized as lords. Personal loyalty to one's superior thus played a decisive role in reproducing and reaffirming the political order of the ah tepal, and helped assure that those promoted to higher ranks could maintain their power.

Tribute also played a role in the matter. The Early Postclassic world operated on an immense volume of tributary goods and labor, and the need to collect and direct these resources in the most efficient way possible inevitably led to administrative centralization. Because of its hegemonic position in this process, Chichén Itzá assumed an architectural and monumental splendor; indeed, it became one of the largest cities of the entire Maya region and ranked among the most prosperous in all of Mesoamerica.

As an inextricable component of these changes, the Early Post-classic conquests brought new gods to the Yucatecan pantheon and introduced new rituals. According to indigenous testimonies, these new rites and deities smacked of idolatry. Without question, the cult of Kukulkán acquired the greatest splendor in terms of religious ceremony. One indigenous testimony states: "It is said that Chichén Itzá's people were not idolaters until the Mexican leader Kukulkán came to these parts; he brought them idolatry, or, as they say, necessity taught them to worship false gods." The classic Maya priesthood presumably adapted itself to the beliefs brought by these invaders.

But the new order was not to last. By the middle of the thirteenth century, disagreements between Hunac Ceel, halach uinic of Mayapán, and Chac Xib Chac, ah tepal of Chichén Itzá, initiated a period of internecine warfare. The ensuing struggles in turn brought about the collapse of the pyramid of personal ties that the sovereign had constructed through the overlords and their respective vassals. The ah tepal vanished as a source of sovereignty, and Chichén Itzá declined as northern Yucatán's leading political center.

The most critical change at this point was the resurgence of lineages, or clans of nobility, as social institutions. Heretofore, they had played a secondary role in constructing the network of personal ties, functioning almost as silent institutions that people understood, but of which they seldom spoke. However, with the fall of the ah tepal the lineages showed new signs of life, taking their place along with personal ties as the entities upon which political structure would be built in the second half of the thirteenth century.

THE FRAGILITY OF THE MAYAPÁN MULTEPAL

The consequences of this renewed vitality soon became apparent. The great lords of the Cocom, Xiu, Chel, Tzeh, Canul, Cupul, Iuit, Pech, and Cochuah lineages dedicated themselves to the task of reorganizing the northern lowlands around the multepal, a form of government in which the overlords made decisions in common. Mayapán did serve as the place of residence for the Cocom halach uinic, for as the great Franciscan evangelist and chronicler friar Diego de Landa wrote, "for the republic to continue, the house of Cocom would have to have the principal voice, for it was the oldest and richest, and its head was the bravest." Nevertheless, everything indicates that the Mayapán leader lacked sufficient power to be considered a primus inter pares. Unlike the ah tepal, participation in the multepal was limited to certain prominent lords of the peninsular northwest.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Maya Lords and Lordship by Sergio Quezada, Terry Rugeley. Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations,
List of Tables,
Preface,
Introduction,
1. Personal Ties and Maya Political Organization,
2. From Lordship to Early Colonial Pueblo,
3. Gobernadores and Indian Cabildos,
4. Decline of the Caciques,
Conclusion,
Appendix A: The Cúuchcabalob of the Mid-Sixteenth Century,
Appendix B: Lineages, Caciques, and Gobernadores Sources for Appendices A and B,
Appendix C: Major Spanish Urban Centers and Their Jurisdictions,
Appendix D: Sixteenth-Century Governors of Yucatán: Names, Titles, and Tenure,
Notes,
Glossary,
Bibliography,
Index,