SPANISH-MAYA CONTACT

What has been called the "Classic Maya Collapse" during the ninth and tenth centuries is questioned by some authors, who claim that undoubtedly there were factors which contributed to this "collapse". Thus it may be better referred to as a "decline or transformation" of the political, economic and social system. (20)

What is known is that there were still over 200,000 Maya living at the time the Spaniards arrived, (early 16th century). Before the British came the Spanish exercised jurisdiction over those Maya communities during most of the 16th and 17th centuries. (21) The decline of the Maya population is attributed to various factors, including rampant diseases brought by the Spaniards, and war between the two which resulted in massacres of the Maya.

Another important factor in the decline of the population is the theory that the Maya were used for slave trading. Approximately half a million enslaved Mayas were exported from Central America in the sixteenth century. This reduced the population from approximately two and quarter million people at the time the Spaniards arrived in 1523 to no more than half a million fifty years later. During this time, there was a great demand for slave labour in the early Spanish settlements of Hispaniola, Cuba, Panama, and Peru in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. (22)

"...At that time there was no Belize, no Guatemala, no Mexico. Before the Spanish came, there were various indigenous societies and civilizations with distinct socio-political systems, and many of them shared common features and had contact with each other through trade and war; there was a lively exchange of knowledge as well as goods between them". (23)

During this period the Maya revolted and resisted the Spanish authority which tried to exercise control over the Maya and territory. The Maya were subjected to numerous attacks by the Spaniards, their culture, traditions, and religion were basically destroyed, and eventually, this brought an end to their two-hundred year resistance.

Nigel Boland observes that there was a big demand for Indian slaves in Central America during the early Spanish settlements of Hispaniola, Cuba, Panama and Peru in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, and concluded, that the "first colonial economy of the region was based on slave trading...(and it) remained the principal colonial economic activity until the decline in the population reduced the supply". (24)

Perhaps because of Madrid's indifference, Belize was never a priority and the Spaniards never settled in Belize. Belize was believed to be "unsuitable for settlement" and "virtually abandoned by the Spanish who had an unusual fear of its dense, forbidding jungles and unhealthy climate". As one historian put it, "this opened the doors for the British occupation of Belize and a new era of colonial history". (25)