Diego de Landa

In 1562 Franciscans at Maní in Yucatán found offerings and carved images in a cave, and Landa, then provincial of the order, opened an inquiry into idolatry among Maya who had already been baptised. It ran for three months without royal or episcopal authority. Suspects were hoisted on the rope and had water forced into them. The surviving depositions describe thousands questioned, well over a hundred dead under or after interrogation, and many left crippled. It ended with an auto de fe on 12 July at which images, altars and hieroglyphic manuscripts were burned. Landa's own text says twenty seven books went into the fire and records that the Maya present wept.

Bishop Francisco de Toral, arriving to find what had been done in his diocese, stopped the proceedings and reported them, and Landa returned to Spain to answer before the Council of the Indies. He was acquitted in 1569 and came back to Yucatán as its bishop in 1573. Four Maya hieroglyphic books survive anywhere in the world today. How large the corpus had been before 1562 is not recoverable, and Maní was not the only burning, but it is the one whose perpetrator wrote it down. The three codices with European provenance, at Dresden, Madrid and Paris, all left Yucatán in the sixteenth century. The fourth surfaced from a cave in Chiapas in the 1960s and was disputed for fifty years before Mexican authentication settled it.

The Relación de las cosas de Yucatán contains a page on which Landa asked a Maya informant to write the letters of the Spanish alphabet, and recorded the signs he was given. For four hundred years this was treated as a curiosity or a fraud, because the signs plainly do not work as an alphabet: asked for the letter be, the Maya scribe supplied a sign for the syllable bay, which is what the name of the letter sounds like.

In 1952 the Russian linguist Yuri Knórozov argued that the script was logographic and syllabic together, and that the list was a partial syllabary badly labelled. That reading was resisted for decades, partly for reasons of Cold War academic politics, and is now the basis of a decipherment that reads most surviving Maya inscriptions. The rest of the Relación is no less useful and no less compromised. It sets out the two calendars and their interlocking cycle, the month festivals, the new year ceremonies and the deities of the four directions, from the notes of a man who had spent years extracting information under duress. What survives is also not his manuscript. The text known today is a shortened copy made around 1660 and published in 1864, so the original length and arrangement are lost.