The Avendaño embassy to the Peten Itza (1695-1696)
Two years before the Peten was stormed, three Franciscans and four Maya cantores walked into the capital of the last independent Maya kingdom without soldiers and argued for days out of the Itza's own katun count, read from their painted bark screenfolds. The relator of the Council of the Indies printed all of it in 1701, the lance levelled at the friar and the assault included.
Why this wins its question: The fall of the Itza in 1697 is usually told in English as the tidy last page of the Maya conquest: a lake, a galliot, an island stormed, the end of independent Mesoamerica. What the sources that win that question leave out is the two years before it, and this object supplies them from the 1701 sheets. It prints the composition of the embassy - three friars and four Maya cantores, no soldiers - the route by the road then being cut, the Itza embassy that came the other way, and above all the argument: a Spanish missionary reasoning from the Itza's own katun count, read out of painted bark screenfolds the book stops to describe as folded "à manera de Viombo, que ellos llamavan Analtees". It gives the refusal in the refusers' words, including a cacique's flint lance and the retort about the time being fulfilled, and it puts on the same record the Canek's request that a rival be beheaded, the friars lost five days in the forest, and the chapter title in which the whole thing ends in an assault. A defence of the embassy that omitted any of those would not survive being told about them later.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The source read for this object is the Historia de la conquista de la Provincia de el Itza, reduccion, y progressos de la de el Lacandon, Primera Parte, by Don Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, advocate and formerly relator of the Real Chancilleria of Valladolid and at the time of writing relator in the Real y Supremo Consejo de las Indias, to which the book is dedicated. Its printed title leaf carries no imprint; the engraved plate facing it is signed "Marcus Orozco, Delin.t et Scup.t M.ti 1701", which is the evidence on the sheets for a Madrid printing of 1701. The dedicatoria says the book was printed by the Council's own order, "fue Mandato de V. A. el que le sacasse à Luz, para todo el Mundo".
The author never crossed the Atlantic. He compiled the history in Madrid, as an officer of the Council of the Indies, from the despatches, autos and religious relations that reached it; that is the ground of the book's detail and also its limit. Where it reports what the Itza said, it is at least two removes from the saying, and every claim below is a claim about what the book prints.
The embassy was sent, and was unarmed. The governor of Yucatan Don Martin de Ursua wrote a letter of embassy to the Canek, king of the Itzaex, and despatched it by the Father Commissary Fray Andres de Avendaño, who took as companions the Fathers Fray Joseph de Jesus Maria and Fray Diego de Chavarria, with four Indian cantores and sacristanes from their convents carrying patents and licence from their provincial. They went by the newly opened road through Zucthock, Chumpich and Bateab to Chuntuchi, where the teniente general Alonso Garcia de Paredes had his camp; the going out of Yucatan is dated to the end of 1695, before Ursua knew that an Itza ambassador, Don Martin Can, was on his way to Merida.
The embassy was reciprocal, and the Itza sent one of their own. Four Itzaex arrived at the pueblo of Tipu from the Gran Peten of the Laguna, among them a principal and ambassador said to be the Canek's nephew, carrying an embassy and messages for the governor of Yucatan and for the captain Francisco de Hariza. The book therefore describes an exchange of embassies between two states, not a one-sided approach.
The argument the friar used was the Itza's own calendar, and the book describes the books it was read from. Avendaño satisfied the assembled caciques, it says, "por la quenta señalada, que ellos mismos tenian, de que vsavan, para ajustar sus antiguas Profezias, y los Tiempos de su cumplimiento" - by the marked count they themselves kept and used to fit their ancient prophecies and the times of their fulfilment - which were characters and figures painted on tree barks, each leaf or tablet about a quarter long and as thick as a piece of eight, folded one way and the other in the manner of a folding screen, "que ellos llamavan Analtees". That is a printed description of a Maya screenfold codex and of a Spanish missionary arguing from the katun count rather than against it.
The Itza who refused were given their own words in the book. In a sudden tumult at the court, principales rebuked King Canek to his face, saying that a nation as great and valiant as the Itzalana had never needed the friendship of the Spaniards nor their law and had no need of them now. The cacique and captain Coboxh, holding out and levelling his flint-tipped lance at the friar, asked "Y què importa, que el Tiempo se aya cumplido, si aùn no se le hà gastado à mi Lança de Pedernàl esta delgada punta?" - what does it matter that the time is fulfilled, if this thin point has not yet been worn off my flint lance? The refusal is thus recorded as an argument and a threat, not as mere savagery, in a book written to celebrate the conquest.
The friars stayed three and a half days in the Canek's court in controversies, disputes and persuasions, and left with an answer favourable in appearance: a profession of wanting to be Christians and to have peace and union with the Spaniards, sealed by the Canek giving two crowns and a fan in return for the governor's present, and presenting Avendaño with a bedspread, a towel and other curious things of that land. The book also records that Avendaño had baptised more than three hundred children.
The same audience produced a request that no account of the episode should omit. The book states that the Canek charged the friar to tell the governor to have the cacique Coboxh and his followers beheaded, as rivals of his own and of the Spaniards, and that in all else he would hand over the five islands or Petenes. The Spanish approach was therefore being drawn into an existing Itza faction fight, and the invitation to violence in this passage comes from the Itza king.
The return nearly killed them. Guided out of the Peten on a road different from the one they had come by, the friars found the path erased within a short distance, wandered five days blind through thickets, sierras and forest without provisions, struck a great river they followed for five days more and could not ford, lost the last vestiges of the track and gave themselves up to divine will, taking a westward course. They reached Merida against the general expectation, the book says, that the barbarous Itzaex had eaten them if they had arrived alive.
What they brought back was formally taken down as evidence, and part of it is ethnography. The friars reported everything to their prelate, to the governor and publicly, and attested it on oath with their prelate's licence. Avendaño had asked the Canek the population of his island and of the four others in the lake; the answer recorded is that the Peten Grande contained twenty-two parcialidades, like barrios or small towns, each with its own cacique governing it, and that each of the other four Petenes, though smaller in circuit, had the same number of parcialidades and almost the same people. The Canek could give no figure for the number of people in them, and the book says so instead of inventing one.
The negotiation failed and the outcome was an assault, which the book announces in its own chapter heading rather than burying: libro VIII capitulo IX is headed "Continuan en flechar los Barbaros: Protestales el General Don Martin de Vrsua los daños: Hieren à algunos de los Españoles: Rompese la Guerra: Saltan los Nuestros en Tierra: Y tomase el Petèn". The same chapter records that Ursua forbade his men on pain of life to fire piece, pedrero or musket and had it repeated through interpreters in the Itza language that he came not for war but for peace and friendship, and that the Itza, taking this for weakness, mocked and shot the harder. Both halves of that are the book's; neither cancels the other.
What this object does not establish should be said plainly. It rests on one source, a compilation made in Madrid and dedicated to the body that ordered it printed, so it is an official account and reads like one. Avendaño's own relacion of the journey, which survives separately, was not consulted and is not reachable from this container; nothing here is attributed to it. The object makes no claim about the date or the casualties of the taking of the island, about how many Itza died, about what became of the Canek, or about the content of the katun prophecy beyond the fact that the book says the friar argued from the Itza's own count. Libros I to III, VI, IX and X and the Segunda Parte were not opened.