Spanish Conquest of Guatemala - Impact of Old World Diseases

Impact of Old World Diseases

Epidemics accidentally introduced by the Spanish included smallpox, measles and influenza. These diseases, together with typhus and yellow fever, had a major impact on Maya populations. The Old World diseases brought with the Spanish and against which the indigenous New World peoples had no resistance were a deciding factor in the conquest; the diseases crippled armies and decimated populations before battles were even fought. Their introduction was catastrophic in the Americas; it is estimated that 90% of the indigenous population had been eliminated by disease within the first century of European contact.

In 1519 and 1520, before the arrival of the Spanish in the region, a number of epidemics swept through southern Guatemala. At the same time as the Spanish were occupied with the overthrow of the Aztec empire, a devastating plague struck the Kaqchikel capital of Iximche, and the city of Q'umarkaj, capital of the K'iche', may also have suffered from the same epidemic. It is likely that the same combination of smallpox and a pulmonary plague swept across the entire Guatemalan Highlands. Modern knowledge of the impact of these diseases on populations with no prior exposure suggests that 33–50% of the population of the highlands perished. Population levels in the Guatemalan Highlands did not recover to their pre-conquest levels until the middle of the 20th century. In 1666 pestilence or murine typhus swept through what is now the department of Huehuetenango. Smallpox was reported in San Pedro Saloma, in 1795. At the time of the fall of Nojpetén in 1697, there are estimated to have been 60,000 Maya living around Lake Petén Itzá, including a large number of refugees from other areas. It is estimated that 88% of them died during the first ten years of colonial rule owing to a combination of disease and war.

Read more about this topic:  Spanish Conquest Of Guatemala

Famous quotes containing the words impact of, impact, world and/or diseases:

    Conquest is the missionary of valour, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
    Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)

    The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.
    Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)

    For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?
    Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)

    The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)