Yucatan Before and After the Conquest: Introduction

It is perhaps not too strong a statement to make, that ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told. Landa left for us there the knowledge of their days and months, and the ceremonial festivals for planting, hunting and their other daily activities; the same preparations for a prosperous New Year by the favor and protection of the powers of the earth and sky, the devotions, new resolutions and the dismissal of the scapegoat of the old year and invocation of a coming better one, all as we do when we clean house and decorate for the coming of Santa Claus and his reindeer—who would certainly have been 'demons' to him had he found their images among the Mayas: in short, the many social and communal functions in which their life was expressed.

These things were told him possibly by Gaspar Antonio Chi (of whom we shall read later), but more probably by Nachi Cocom as stated by Landa himself, and whose bones he later dug up and cast into the fields on the suspicion that he had practised ancient Maya customs after he had been baptised; and from them we learned the structure of their yearly social calendar, and therefrom got our start.

He knew of their greater "count of ages," but only that such a count existed. He did not understand it, but left a one-line formula which, used as a mathematical and chronological key, opened to us their greatness in that science, and their almost perfect astronomy.

He also told us, as learned probably through Chi and derived from the Xiu sources of western Yucatan, much of the history of the northern part of the peninsula, after the fall of what we have called the Old Empire.

If ninety-nine hundredths of our present knowledge is at base derived from what he told us, it is an equally safe statement that at that Auto de fé of

Then finally came a fortunate turning up of the unpublished Tax List of 1549, the very year that Landa arrived in Yucatan as a simple Franciscan friar. Without this as a concrete documented background for the population figures then, more than half the value of the 1579-Relations would not have come out.

A few shorter pieces of documentation, published and unpublished, came up to fit in place. The first is the delicious bit of political 'back-up' play shown by the multiple set of 'form letters,' ostensibly signed by a number of native caciques, to be sent to the king asking him to send back their beloved friar Landa and other Franciscans. One of these was printed 60 years ago in the great volume of Cartas de Indias, and since supposed to stand alone as an expression of love especially for Landa himself; the fact being that this was but one of a number, all the Indians' names signed for them in the same hand as the letters, a second instance of which appears in facsimile immediately after the text of the Relation and its final epilogue. This has not before been known, or published. It is also followed by another long letter, signed by the very Francisco de Montejo Xiu, governor of Maní, he who first came of his own accord to yield to Montejo in January 1542, together with other governors of high standing, disavowing these "procured" duplicate letters as false, and then relating what had in fact been done to their people.

Finally I have added two more official documents of the time, without whose inclusion no sure and clear envisioning of the forces at play, and their work and results would have been possible. One is the Ordinances of Tomás

That the principle itself is at issue appears in our very present 'affaire Landa,' in the work of Molina Solis. Outside of Justin Winsor's Narrative and Critical History, we have hardly a work in the United States to compare with his on the History of Yucatan, for pure scholarship in the real sense, for fair and unbiassed treatment of his facts. Himself an element in the aristocratic Díaz régime, with his family made wealthy by the new-found 'green gold,' the sisal hemp that with cattle and sugar turned the last screws on Indian independence, he is unsparing in his Indemnation of Landa, both humanely and legally. And yet he defends and believes in the López Ordinances for the ecclesiastical regimentation of all Indian life, for the plain reason that he believed in that ideology. My personal remembrances of him are those of a charming scholar, a delightful man, and I imagine too a lovable man (not at all like Audomaro, who just was not). I think he was kindly (a rather rare quality), and that in his heart he worshipped that which we refer to as 'God,' but he wrapped it up, legalistically, in the keys of Peter; hence the accepted 'beneficence' of the López regulations. Of course he

Elsewhere the 'apostates' are referred to as 'ateistas luteranos.' This rule that no apostate, and above all no 'judaizing heretic,' could come to or remain in Spanish America under penalty of expulsion or death, remained the law until colonial independence, and the same total intolerance was even one of the three major principles of the short Iturbide reactionary 'Empire' in Mexico. But also, it was this very Bull on which the religious friars sought to rest their emergency Inquisitional claims, by an interpretation they claimed as its necessary meaning and expansion. But in this they never gained their point, although over in Mexico a certain friar, one Augustin de la Coruba, hunting for a 'concealed' idol, assumed the autoridad omnimoda, constituted himself inquisitor, built a great fire in the plaza and threatened to burn the town governor and the whole town alive, unless they showed him the idol.

The matter then came to formal consideration, and on April 27, 1539, the four bishops met in Mexico, among other things took note of the claims by the friars to authority in derogation of the bishops, and ordered that whipping and flogging should not be used to enforce obedience to the church, or in matters of faith. All three of the Orders were also present, and signed the procedure. While this did not of course abolish the Inquisition itself, it put a definite ban on all the acts of the friars with which we have to do in the present work. This was then two years before the youth Diego de Landa entered the Franciscan order, at the age of 17; also before Montejo reached Ti-ho, established Merida, and "by the aid of the Xius of Maní, began the tributes." See besides the letter of this same Kukum, Montejo Xiu, the Lord of Maní, and others, to the king, in 1567.