Mayapan Falls in Yucatan

1441

The last centralized Maya political authority, the walled city of Mayapan in the northern Yucatan, was sacked and permanently abandoned following a violent revolt by the Xiu lineage against the ruling Cocom dynasty. The peninsula fragmented into sixteen quarreling small kingdoms that would still be fighting each other with obsidian-edged clubs when the Spanish arrived eighty years later. Any remaining hope of Maya political unity was finished.