The Last Independent Kingdom

Hernan Cortes himself passed through Nojpetan in 1525 on his overland march to Honduras, and the Itza ruler Kan Ek received him peacefully and reportedly promised eventual conversion, a promise the kingdom spent the following century and a half declining to honor. Spanish friars and soldiers made repeated attempts to bring the Itza under colonial and ecclesiastical control across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Itza met most of these missions with polite deferral, periodic hostility, or the killing of missionaries who pressed too hard, while quietly maintaining their traditional religion, calendar and priesthood behind the buffer of the surrounding Peten jungle. That buffer finally failed in 1697, when the Spanish governor Martin de Ursua led an armed expedition to Lake Peten Itza, built boats, and stormed Nojpetan directly, smashing the temples and idols the Spanish found there and completing the conquest of the last independent Maya kingdom on the same day, March 13, 1697.

The fall of Nojpetan is usually cited as the effective end of the pre-Columbian political order anywhere in the Americas, closing out nearly two centuries in which one Maya kingdom had continued to practice its own religion and answer to its own rulers after every other native state in the hemisphere had already fallen.