Why go
Conquest was not only a series of battles. Epidemics spread through Yucatán in the 1520s and 1530s and recurred later, while displacement and colonial demands deepened the damage. Maya written histories recorded the plagues. This context makes abandoned settlements and sharp population changes intelligible without reducing them to warfare alone.
The full story
Smallpox reached central Mexico in 1520 and appears to have spread rapidly across the Maya area. Maya histories from Yucatán and the Guatemalan Highlands record epidemics, although brief descriptions often make it hard to identify each disease precisely. Smallpox, measles, influenza and respiratory illnesses all appear in later accounts. Outbreaks returned during the sixteenth century; later reports also describe fevers and a serious epidemic in 1648. Their effects varied by place and were entangled with forced movement, poor housing and food shortages under colonial rule. The former province of Ekab in northeastern Yucatán illustrates the scale of change. Spanish records counted a large settlement at Conil when Montejo arrived in 1528, but far fewer registered taxpayers there by 1549. Those records do not give a simple count of deaths; flight and disruption also changed who remained. Together they show why disease and colonial policy belong in any account of the peninsula's conquest.