The legendary history of the coming of the Mayas to Chi-chen Itza is alluded to by Landa in several passages. He states:
It is the opinion among the Indians that with the Itzas who populated Chi-chen Itza, there reigned a great man called Kukul Can, and the principal temple of the city is called Kukul Can. They say he entered from the west, that he was very genteel, and that he had neither wife nor children. After he left Chi-chen Itza he was considered in Mexico one of their gods and called Quetzal Coatl and in Yucatan they also had him for a god.
In another place Landa says:
The ancient Indians say that in Chi-chen Itza reigned three brothers. This was told to them by their ancestors. The three brothers came from the west and they reigned for some years in peace and justice. They honored their god very much and thus built many buildings and beautiful, especially one. These men, they say, lived without wives and in great honesty and virtue, and during this time they were much esteemed and obeyed by all. After a time one of them failed, who had to die, although some of the Indians said he went to Bak-halal. The absence of this one, no matter how he went, was felt so much by those who reigned after him that they began to be licentious and formed habits dishonorable and ungovernable, and the people began to hate them in such a way that they killed them, one after the other, and destroyed and abandoned the city.
Virtually the same stories are contained in a document found at Valladolid and dated 1618, which goes on to state that the newer part of Chi-chen Itza was built about 1200 a.d.
The ancient city consists of two parts, the southern, which is ruined to such as extent that it contains almost no standing edifices, and the newer city built to the north, which contains many buildings—some of them almost perfectly preserved. I believe that much of the older city was built at least a thousand years prior to most of the buildings in the newer city, and there is ample evidence to substantiate the belief that the old city was ruthlessly robbed of its carvings and cut stones for use in the construction of the new.
The Nahuatl influence is seen in the newer buildings. It is thought that Chi-chen Itza reached the height of its civil power, though not its artistic supremacy, after it had been conquered by the Aztec warriors from the north, and the native inhabitants were reduced to slavery and driven by their masters to the speedy building of many temples—an undertaking which they would have gone about in much more leisurely fashion had there been no compulsion.
Don Pedro Aguilar, one of the earliest historians of Yucatan, states that six hundred years before the coming of the Spaniards the Mayas were the vassals of the Aztecs and were forced by them to construct remarkable edifices such as those found at Chi-chen Itza and Uxmal.
Herbert Spinden, in his admirable little book “Ancient Civilizations of Mexico,” has most happily drawn an analogy between the traits of the Mayas and Aztecs and the similar traits of the old Greeks and Romans. The Mayas were like the Greeks, the creative race, while the Aztecs were primarily warriors, as were the Romans.
Just what was the impulse which led these people to undertake the mighty works they accomplished,—whether it was religious fervor or plain fear,—we do not know. We do know that their age of greatest progress was within the era of verifiable history. We know that they built many large cities; and that there was a large population; Chi-chen Itza was a city of at least two hundred thousand inhabitants, and some archæologists believe that at one time its population numbered no less than a million.