9 – 18 February 1524
The road to Xelajú
From Xetulul Alvarado turns up the Samalá River into the Sierra Madre, towards the pass that leads into the valley of Xelajú. The town belongs to the K'iche' kingdom of Q'umarkaj. Its K'iche' name means "under ten mountains", and the Nahuatl name the Mexican allies give it, Quetzaltenango, means "the walled place of the quetzal bird".
The main square of Quetzaltenango and the mountains around the valley, photographed by Eadweard Muybridge in 1875Wikimedia Commons, Eadweard Muybridge, Public domain (Parque a Centro América (Quetzaltenango, Guatemala 1875).png)
The Título K'oyoi, written by a member of the K'oyoi lineage who says he saw the Spanish arrive, records that the K'iche' know of the Spanish advance. They block the way with large stone slabs, walls and ditches set with stakes, which the Spaniards and their allies pull down. The local lords send to Q'umarkaj for help, and the great captain Tecum, a grandson of the king K'iq'ab, marches out by way of Tzijbachaj, now Totonicapán. Later tradition knows him as Tecun Uman.
The fighting comes in two battles, on 12 February 1524 on the approach to Xelajú and on 18 February in the valley near Olintepeque. In a letter of 11 April 1524 Alvarado writes that one of the four lords of Q'umarkaj, "captain general of all this country", dies on the approach. The Kaqchikel annals date the death of Tecun Uman to 12 February. Guatemala commemorates it on 20 February, and local tradition places it on the Llanos de Urbina near Cantel or at Olintepeque. The positions of both battles are known by tradition only.
A Spanish horseman and Tlaxcalan warriors against the K'iche' at Quetzaltenango, from the 16th-century Lienzo de Tlaxcala in its 1892 reproductionWikimedia Commons, unknown artist, Public domain (Lienzo de Tlaxcala Quetzaltenango.gif)
Sources
- Ruud van Akkeren, Tecum Umam: ¿personaje mítico o histórico? (2004), on the Título K'oyoi.
- Matthew Restall and Florine Asselbergs, Invading Guatemala: Spanish, Nahua, and Maya Accounts of the Conquest Wars (2007), pp. 9, 30.
- Pedro de Alvarado, letters to Cortés, 1524.
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