Not an empire, and not one conquest
The title of this article is a common phrase, but it contains two misleading ideas. There was never a “Mayan empire” for Spain to defeat, and there was no single conquest. By the time Europeans arrived in the early sixteenth century, the Maya lived in dozens of independent polities across Yucatan, the Guatemalan highlands and the Petén forest, with different rulers, dialects and alliances. The great Classic lowland cities had mostly been abandoned centuries before. The Spanish therefore had to subdue region after region, and the process took about 170 years, from the 1520s until 1697. That contrasts sharply with the swift campaigns against the Triple Alliance empire of the Aztecs and the Inca state, where capturing a capital could shift control over a large territory.
Contact and the first failures
Spanish ships first sighted the Yucatan coast in 1517, and a further expedition followed in 1518. In 1519 Hernan Cortes sailed along the coast on his way to central Mexico; the dramatic story of Cortes and Tenochtitlan, however, belongs to a different civilization and a different campaign. Spanish interest in Yucatan came later, as an extension of the conquest of Mexico.
Francisco de Montejo, an officer who had served under Cortes, led an expedition to Yucatan in the 1520s. His forces, later joined by those of his son of the same name, met strong resistance from Maya leaders in the north, who fought as local armies and sometimes allied with, sometimes opposed, one another. By about 1535 the Spanish had been driven out. Over the following decades, epidemic diseases introduced from Europe and Africa caused heavy population loss across the Americas, and the Maya region was affected as well.
Mérida and the northern conquest
The younger Montejo returned and in 1542 founded the city of Merida on the site of the Maya town of T’ho. Maya lords in the region of Mani agreed to cooperate, and others were defeated in the next few years. A major rebellion in the eastern provinces in 1546 and 1547 was suppressed, but the Spanish control of the north remained incomplete for a long time, and many Maya communities lived with a mixture of tribute demands, forced labour and religious pressure. Franciscan friars arrived to convert people. In 1562, in Mani, Friar Diego de Landa investigated alleged idolatry, ordered harsh punishments and burned Maya books and images, a destruction that removed much of the written record of Maya deities and rituals.
The highlands
In the highlands of Guatemala the conquest followed another path. In 1524 Pedro de Alvarado led Spanish forces, together with many allies drawn from other Mesoamerican peoples, against the K’iche’ and Kaqchikel. Those kingdoms were weakened by rivalry with each other, which the Spanish exploited. The K’iche’ capital, Q’umarkaj, was captured in 1524. Spanish rule of Guatemala was then established, and Maya communities were pushed into labour and tribute systems. As in the Andes, where the Pizarro and Atahualpa episode is the best-known case, the Spanish succeeded partly by exploiting existing rivalries, although the timelines and political structures differed.
The Itza at Nojpeten
The last independent Maya kingdom was in the Petén lakes region. There the Itza ruled from an island capital, Nojpeten, on Lake Petén Itzá. Cortes had passed through their territory in 1525 and had been received peacefully, but the Itza otherwise had little contact with the Spanish for another century and a half. Franciscan missions in the seventeenth century had little success there, and the Itza remained politically independent.
In 1697 a Spanish expedition under Martin de Ursua y Arizmendi attacked Nojpeten from boats and took the island city, ending the independent Itza kingdom. This is usually treated as the last major Spanish conquest of a Maya state. Even after that, other Maya communities in remote areas stayed outside Spanish control for years.
What the conquest did not end
Maya people were not eliminated by the conquest. They lost political independence, and many died of epidemics and hardship, but they survived and adapted. In the nineteenth century, a long conflict called the Caste War of Yucatan, beginning in 1847, led to a Maya-controlled territory in the eastern peninsula that persisted into the early twentieth century. Maya languages and customs continue today, and the Maya remain among the largest Indigenous populations in the Americas. The Spanish conquest of Yucatan, in short, is a story of long resistance, partial control and continuity, not of a clean collapse of an empire.