Yucatan Peninsula historical timeline

The Yucatan has been continuously inhabited by the same people for three thousand years, which is unusual, and its history is largely theirs.

The Maya

Cities rose across the peninsula from the Preclassic period onward. Calakmul was one of the two great powers of the Classic Maya world, locked in a long rivalry with Tikal; Uxmal and the Puuc cities flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries; and Chichen Itza became dominant in the Terminal Classic, with architecture showing strong central Mexican influence. The Classic collapse in the ninth century emptied many cities, but Maya society continued — Mayapan ruled much of the north until the fifteenth century.

A slow conquest

The Spanish found the Yucatan much harder to take than central Mexico. There was no single empire to decapitate, and the campaign begun in 1527 took nearly twenty years; the last independent Maya kingdom, at Tayasal, held out until 1697, 176 years after the fall of Tenochtitlan. Bishop Diego de Landa burned the Maya codices at Mani in 1562 and then, with some irony, wrote the account that allowed the script to be deciphered.

The Caste War

In 1847 Maya communities rose against the creole elite and came close to taking the whole peninsula. The conflict lasted, in a diminishing form, until 1901, and an independent Maya polity at Chan Santa Cruz functioned for decades.

Henequen and after

Sisal fibre made Merida rich between 1880 and 1920 on the backs of indentured labour, then collapsed when synthetic rope arrived. In 1970 the Mexican government selected an empty sandbar for a planned resort and built Cancun, which changed the peninsula completely.