1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [157]
Maya polities were not large enough to maintain standing armies; instead both Kaan and Oxwitza’ mustered short-term militiamen to fight wars. Wearing cotton armor and wooden helmets, brandishing lances, hatchets, and maces, and carrying great painted litters with effigies of their gods, the two militias marched on Mutal. Kaan is some sixty miles north of Mutal; Oxwitza’ is fifty miles south of it. The two cities planned to crush Mutal between them. They carefully chose the day of the attack. Maya priests tracked the movements of Venus, which they regarded as a powerful portent. Its day of emergence in the morning sky was considered an occasion on which warfare and violence was likely to be rewarded—an optimal day to attack a city. On April 29, 562, in what archaeologists call a Star Wars assault, the two celestially guided armies overran Mutal, sacked its precincts, and probably killed its king (the relevant glyphs are too worn to read).
THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
Kaan and Mutal Battle to Control the Maya Heartland, 526–682 A.D.
The war between Kaan and Mutal lasted more than a century and consumed much of the Maya heartland. Kaan’s strategy was to surround Mutal and its subordinate city-states with a ring of enemies. By conquest, negotiation, and marriage alliance, Kaan succeeded in encircling its enemy—but not in winning the war.
Kaan did not directly occupy Mutal; victorious Maya cities rarely had the manpower to rule their rivals directly. Instead, in the by-now familiar hegemonic pattern, they tried to force the rulers of the vanquished state to become their vassals. If an enemy sovereign was slain, as apparently happened in Mutal, the conquerors often didn’t emplace a new one; kings were divine, and thus by definition irreplaceable. Instead the victorious force simply quit the scene, hoping that any remaining problems would disappear in the ensuing chaos. This strategy was partly successful in Mutal—not a single dated monument was erected in the city for a century. Because the city’s postattack rulers had (at best) distant connections to the slain legitimate king, they struggled for decades to get on their feet. Unhappily for Kaan, they eventually did it.
The agent for Mutal’s return was its king, Nuun Ujol Chaak. Taking the helm of the city in 620 A.D., he was as determined to reestablish his city’s former glory as Kaan’s rulers were to prevent it. He suborned Kaan’s eastern neighbor, Naranjo, which attacked Mutal’s former ally, Oxwitza’. The ensuing conflict spiraled out to involve the entire center of the Maya realm. Decades of conflict, including a long civil war in Mutal, led to the formation of two large blocs, one dominated by Mutal, the other by Kaan. As cities within the blocs traded attacks with each other, half a dozen cities ended up in ruins, including Naranjo, Oxwitza’, Mutal, and Kaan. The story was not revealed in full until 2001, when a storm uprooted a tree in the ruin of Dos Pilas, a Mutal outpost. In the hole from its root ball archaeologists discovered a set of steps carved with the biography of B’alaj Chan K’awiil, a younger brother or half brother to Mutal’s dynasty-restoring king, Nuun Ujol Chaak. As deciphered by the epigrapher Stanley Guenter, the staircase and associated monuments reveal the turbulent life of a great scalawag who spent his life alternately running from the armies of Kaan and Mutal and trying to set them against each