Mopan

The Mopan are a Maya people of the southern lowlands whose language belongs to the Yucatecan branch. In the Postclassic their hamlets along the Mopan River formed a kuchkabal, or polity, whose capital was probably near San Luis and which fell under the political and religious influence of the Itza kingdom of Petén Itzá.

Hernán Cortés may have crossed the Mopan polity's north-eastern edge in 1525, and the Pacheco entrada of 1543–1544 failed to subdue it. The last known Mopan leader, Taxim Chan, headed a town around 1695, when Itza attacks and the Spanish conquest of Petén converged on the territory.

The territory's west was subdued in the 1690s and colonial reducciones had forcibly relocated most of the population by the 1720s. During the eighteenth century English pressure from the Bay Settlement drove many Mopan out of Belize and into Petén.