From Chichen Itza to Lake Peten

The Itza are best known to most people through the ruins of Chichen Itza, the great Yucatan city whose stepped pyramid, astronomically aligned to cast a serpent shaped shadow at the equinoxes, and whose sacred cenote received offerings and, by some accounts, sacrificial victims for generations. Scholars debate how directly the Itza who eventually ruled the city relate to its earlier Puuc-style builders, but by the time Chichen Itza reached its height in the Terminal Classic and Early Postclassic periods, roughly the ninth through eleventh centuries, an Itza dynasty controlled it and dominated much of the northern Yucatan peninsula through alliance and conquest.

Chichen Itza's political power collapsed by the thirteenth century, and Spanish colonial chronicles and Maya sources such as the Books of Chilam Balam describe an Itza migration south into the dense forest of the Peten, where the group settled on and around an island in Lake Peten Itza and built a new capital, Nojpetan, known to the Spanish as Tayasal. This second Itza kingdom preserved a version of the older Yucatec Maya religious and political order for centuries after the rest of the Maya world had fallen under Spanish rule, making it a living continuation of pre-conquest Maya kingship long after that kingship had disappeared everywhere else.