Under the beneficent rule of Kukulcan, the nation enjoyed its halcyon days of peace and prosperity.  The harvests were abundant and the people turned cheerfully to their daily duties, to their families and their lords.  They forgot the use of arms, even for the chase, and contented themselves with snares and traps.

At length the time drew near for Kukulcan to depart.  He gathered the chiefs together and expounded to them his laws.  From among them he chose as his successor a member of the ancient and wealthy family of the Cocoms.  His arrangements completed, he is said, by some, to have journeyed westward, to Mexico, or to some other spot toward the sun-setting.  But by the people at large he was confidently believed to have ascended into the heavens, and there, from his lofty house, he was supposed to watch over the interests of his faithful adherents.

Such was the tradition of their mythical hero told by the Itzas.  No wonder that the early missionaries, many of whom, like Landa, had lived in Mexico and had become familiar with the story of Quetzalcoatl and his alleged departure toward the east, identified him with Kukulcan, and that, following the notion of this assumed identity, numerous later writers have framed theories to account for the civilization of ancient Yucatan through colonies of “Toltec” immigrants.

It can, indeed, be shown beyond doubt that there were various points of contact between the Aztec and Maya civilizations.  The complex and artificial method of reckoning time was one of these; certain architectural devices were others; a small number of words, probably a hundred all told, have been borrowed by the one tongue from the other.  Mexican merchants traded with Yucatan, and bands of Aztec warriors with their families, from Tabasco, dwelt in Mayapan by invitation of its rulers, and after its destruction, settled in the province of Canul, on the western coast, where they lived strictly separate from the Maya-speaking population at the time the Spaniards conquered the country.[1]

[Footnote 1:  El Libro de Chilan Balam de Chumayel, MS.; Landa, Relacion, p. 54.]

But all this is very far from showing that at any time a race speaking the Aztec tongue ruled the Peninsula.  There are very strong grounds to deny this.  The traditions which point to a migration from the west or southwest may well have referred to the depopulation of Palenque, a city which undoubtedly was a product of Maya architects.  The language of Yucatan is too absolutely dissimilar from the Nahuatl for it ever to have been moulded by leaders of that race.  The details of Maya civilization are markedly its own, and show an evolution peculiar to the people and their surroundings.