Manche Chʼol
The Manche Chʼol were a Maya people who constituted the former Manche Chʼol Territory, a Postclassic polity of the southern Maya Lowlands, within the extreme south of what is now Petén and the area around Lake Izabal in northern Guatemala, and southern Belize. The Manche Chʼol took the name Manche from the name of their main settlement. They were the last of a set of Ch'olan-speaking groups in the eastern Maya Lowlands to remain independent and ethnically distinct. It is likely that they were descended from the inhabitants of Classic period Maya cities in the southeastern Maya Lowlands, such as Nim Li Punit, Copán and Quiriguá.
The first Spanish contact with the Manche Chʼol was in 1525, when an expedition led by Hernán Cortés crossed their territory. From the early 17th century onwards, Dominican friars attempted to concentrate the Manche into mission towns and convert them to Christianity. These attempts alarmed their warlike Itza neighbours to the northwest, who attacked the mission towns and fomented rebellion among the Manche. The Manche Chʼol in the mission towns were badly affected by disease, which also encouraged them to flee the towns.
In the late 17th century, Franciscan missionaries argued that further attempts at peaceful pacification of the Manche Chʼol were useless and argued for armed intervention against them and their Lakandon Chʼol neighbours. The Manche were forcibly relocated in the Guatemalan Highlands, where they did not prosper. By 1770, most of the Manche Chʼol were extinct. The few survivors were soon absorbed into the surrounding Qʼeqchiʼ Maya population.
Geography
Physical
The Manche Ch'ol Territory sat in a -shaped crescent stretching from the Cancuén down to Dulce River, and from there up to the Sittee. As such, the southwestern half of the Territory was delimited by the Montes Mayas–Maya Mountains to the north, and the Sierras de Chamá, de Santa Cruz, and del Mico to the south, while the northeastern half was bounded by the Maya Mountains to the west, and the Bay of Honduras to the east. This area now lies within southern Petén, northeastern Alta Verapaz, northern Izabal, and Toledo and Stann Creek. It is characterised by heavy tropical rainforest coverage, criss-crossed by fast-flowing rivers, and pockmarked by small savannahs and extensive swamps.Human
The Territory's immediate neighbours were the Mopan to their north, Toquegua to their east, and Acala, Q'eqchi', Poqom, and Verapaz to their west. Neighbouring polities further afield included the Peten Itza, Dzuluinicob, Chetumal, and Bacalar to the north, and Lacandon, Palencano, and Chontal to the west. Such a situation positioned the Territory within the confluence of Ch'olan, Yucatecan, Quichean, and Spanish spheres of influence, and has thereby been described as frontier- or borderlands.Small farming settlements dotted the Territory's river banks. In the west, these included Yol, Yaxha, Chocahau, and Manche on the Cancuén, and Tzalac on the Sarstoon. To the east, they included Nito on Rio Dulce, Pusilha on the Moho, Paliac on the Deep River, Campin on the Monkey River, and Tzoite on the Sittee. Of these, Nito, Yaxhal, Paliac, Campin, and Tzoite were set on the coast, while the rest were inland. The principal settlement was the eponymous Manche, which is thought to have housed some one hundred multi-generational households. Tzelac was the closest to Verapaz, set off just from Cahabón.
History
Pre-contact
Beginning in the mid-eighth century, the region that would soon house the Manche Ch'ol Territory experienced marked political and demographic disintegration, including the collapse of city-states and mass exodus from these to the country. As a result, by the tenth century, the burgeoning Territory was rather composed of small, hinterland communities. The Territory's residents are deemed probable descendants of the region's Classic period inhabitants, based on linguistic, ethnographic, and archaeological findings. These are thought to have been restricted to the contact period extent of the Manche Ch'ol Territory by a post-900 migration of Yucatecan speakers from the northern Lowlands.Spanish contact
passed through Manche Chʼol Territory in 1525, and described it as sparsely populated. In the 16th century, the coastal towns of Campin and Tzoite were given in encomienda to Hernando Sánchez de Aguilar; they fell within the jurisdiction of colonial Bacalar, on the Yucatán coast near Chetumal. Although some Manche Chʼols visited the Dominican friars in Cobán, Verapaz, in 1564, the central Manche were not contacted by the Spanish again until 1603, when Dominican missionaries first attempted to evangelise them, and started to gather the scattered inhabitants into towns. In the second half of the 16th century, the still-independent Manche Chʼol became a refuge for Christianised Maya living under Spanish domination in Verapaz, who wished to escape and live as apostates among them and their Lakandon Chʼol neighbours. In 1596, Dominican friar Juan Esguerra reported seeing eleven Manche traders in Cahabón; he claimed that the Manche Chʼol were frequent visitors to the town. In 1600 the regular presence of Manche Chʼol traders in Cahabón was again reported, and they were said to arrive in greater numbers for the town's festivities in honour of its patron saint. Friar Esguerra complained in 1605 of the great number of Christianised Qʼeqchiʼ Maya of Cahabón that were fleeing the town to live as apostates among the Manche Chʼol.By 1606 the missionaries had concentrated many Manche Chʼols in nine new mission towns, and had started to penetrate the territory of the neighbouring Mopan Maya, who were on the borders of the fiercely independent Itza of central Petén. By 1628 the Dominicans were tending to 6,000 Maya in the part of Manche Chʼol Territory that they had gained access to. This figure included some apostate refugees from Spanish-controlled Cahabón. Estimates of the total Manche Chʼol population in the mid-17th century vary from 10,000 to 30,000, with prominent 20th-century Mayanist J. Eric S. Thompson preferring the lower figure as opposed to the high-end estimates by 17th-century chroniclers. The Dominican penetration of Mopan Territory alarmed the Itza, who started to harass the Manche Chʼol, driving them away from the mission towns.
In spite of the Dominicans' successes among the Manche in the early 17th century, they suffered a serious setback in the early 1630s when the Itza and Mopan attacked the Manche Chʼol mission towns, driving out the Dominicans for decades. The Dominicans returned in the 1670s and were able to re-establish several missions in the region. In the late 17th century, the Spanish friars complained of the infidelity of the Manche; that they were quick to adopt Christianity and equally quick to abandon it. Friar Francisco Gallegos complained that trying to concentrate the Manche in mission towns was "like keeping birds in the forest without a cage". Due to the historical links between the Manche Chʼol and the inhabitants of Spanish Cahabón, the Spanish colonial authorities used the Maya inhabitants of Cahabón as guides, interpreters and lay preachers in their attempts to bring the Manche within the empire. By the 1670s the Manche Chʼol were in a difficult position, on the one side forced to bow to Itza trade demands under the threat of armed reprisals, and on the other side forced into extortionate trade with the Spanish encomienda towns. In the late 1670s, Sebastián de Olivera, alcalde mayor of Verapaz, imposed compulsory trade prices upon the Manche Chʼol, forcing one town to buy 70 machetes at 2.5 times the going price, paid in cacao. Refusal to trade was met with violence, and if the Manche could not afford the price demanded then Olivera's representatives would seize goods, clothing, poultry and previously traded metal tools. In 1684 three Franciscan friars were killed during an attempt to evangelise the inhabitants of Paliac. The three missionaries had been accompanying a Spanish expedition to collect valuable cacao; the expedition is likely to have involved considerable Spanish violence. It is likely that the friars were sacrificed by cutting out their hearts.
Extinction
In 1678 the Manche Chʼol population was devastated by disease; in the area around the town of San Lucas Tzalac it killed every child under six years old and almost all of those under the age of ten. Total deaths, including adults, numbered over 400 and the epidemic prompted all the Manche Chʼol in the affected region to abandon the mission towns and flee into the forest. The Spanish made a number of further attempts to pacify the Manche Chʼol, but these were ultimately unsuccessful, and the Manche Chʼol rebelled in 1689. In that year many Manche Chʼol were forcibly relocated to the Urrán Valley in the highlands, resulting in the abandonment of many of the Manche orchards; this eventually led to the collapse of the regional trade network that by then had been fully linked with colonial Guatemala and supplied it with unknown quantities of cacao.In 1694, two Franciscan friars set out from Guatemala to see if they could succeed where the Dominicans had failed. Antonio Margil and Melchor López left Cobán in August 1693 to seek out the hostile Lakandon Chʼols in the depths of the rainforest. Antionio Margil had already spent two years among the Manche Chʼol. Although they found the Lakandon, the mission was a failure and the friars were forced to flee. Disappointed by their failure, in April 1694 the friars wrote a letter to the president of the Audiencia Real of Guatemala, Jacinto de Barrios Leal, stating their belief that any further peaceful attempts at converting the Chʼol peoples were pointless, and that the time had come for military action.
The conquering Spanish carried out several operations to relocate the Manche to Alta Verapaz, with their relocation being completed in 1697, a short time after the Spanish finally defeated their Itza Maya neighbours to the northwest. Most of the surviving Manche Chʼol were forcibly resettled in the Guatemalan Highlands, in the villages of El Chol and Belén, in the Urran Valley near Rabinal. The resettled Manche Chʼol suffered from the abrupt change of climate from tropical lowland rain forest to the cold highlands. They were often not provided with suitable clothing by their Spanish overlords, and many died. The depopulation of the Manche and Lakandon Chʼol lands, and the resulting collapse of long-standing trade routes, resulted in the gradual impoverishment of colonial Verapaz.
In 1699 a Spanish expedition under the command of sergeant Martín de Montoya was sent from the Spanish garrison at Nuestra Señora de los Remedios y San Pablo, Laguna del Itza to investigate Indian activity in the former Chʼol and Mopan territories. He found evidence that there were still surviving Maya in all the lands he crossed, as evidenced by the carefully tended cacao and vanilla orchards. At this time there were said to be 400 relocated Maya from the same area living in Belén.
By 1710 the population of Manche Chʼol in Belén had fallen to just four; everyone else had died as a result of disease, hunger and melancholy. By 1770 the Manche Chʼol were all but extinct; their original territory had been abandoned and had reverted to wilderness, and the few survivors relocated to the highlands numbered not more than 300 in the whole Urran Valley, where there were almost as many Spanish and ladinos. Many Manche Chʼol in Verapaz were absorbed into the expanding Qʼeqchiʼ Maya population, which gradually occupied the vacated Manche lands. It is possible that a few Manche Chʼol survived in the forested interior of Toledo District in Belize, to be later absorbed by incoming Qʼeqchiʼ in the late 19th century. In the very early part of the 19th century, a handful of Maya were still recorded as speaking Chʼol in Cobán.