Maaya

The Maaya, or Yucatec Maya, are the Maya people of the Yucatán Peninsula; their tongue, Máaya t'áan, belongs to the Mayan language family. Their ancestors built the Classic-period cities of Chichen Itza and Coba; after the tenth-century upheavals the peninsula's political centre shifted north. In about 1221 regional lords overthrew Chichen Itza and made Mayapan their capital, led by the Cocom family with the Xiu and other houses sharing government; the league united northern Yucatán for over two centuries.

In 1337 Mayapan still dominated the peninsula, but in 1441 an Xiu revolt sacked and burned the city, and Yucatán broke into rival city-states, sixteen still standing when the Spanish arrived.

Europeans first landed in 1508; shipwrecked in 1511, Gonzalo Guerrero married into a Maya lord's family. Spanish conquest and the encomienda system followed in the 1520s, and introduced diseases carried off many people. The Maya kept their language and communal identity through colonial rule until Mexico's independence in 1821.