Was there any interaction between the Mayan and Aztec empires?
The Maya did not have “an empire”–rather, political units sometimes called “city states” by moderns. Their peak had passed by the time the Aztecs built their empire. (“Empire” isn’t exactly the right word, but I’m simplifying here.) But Maya culture had not disappeared, even though most of the great sites had been abandoned because of ecological collapse or war or war caused by ecological collapse. The Maya traded with the Aztecs but were a bit far from them to be subjugated. And the Maya continued to use their writing system, while the Aztecs used pictograms. Then the Europeans arrived.
In the beginning, the Olmec civilization had influenced the Maya. Later, Teotihuacan was a great power that allied with some of the Maya. But both of these groups were long gone by the time the Aztecs arose.
(I just finished David Drew’s The Lost Chronicles of the Maya Kings, a pretty good summary of what we know about the Maya & how we came to know it. Obviously, there’s a lot more to learn about the Mesoamerican cultures.)
Bridget Burke seems to have answered this well already. Let me just add this:
If the OP is curious if there was contact between the Maya and Aztec culture areas – that is, if he/she is wondering if they were close enough geographically to have contact – then the answer is a definite yes. Because the two cultures peaked 300 to 800 years apart, we can look at this two ways:
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Did the Maya, at their peak, have contact with what would become the Aztec area centuries later? YES. Teotihuacan was the central Mexico (future Aztec area) great power for most of that time, and we know there were plenty of diplomatic and trade exchanges, and even probably some population movements, between the two areas. In the later part of this period, it was the Toltecs who dominate central Mexico (especially in its northeast part), and one need only visit the two parts of Chichen Itza (a Yucatan Maya ruined city) to see how great the difference was between the pre-Toltec and post-Toltec periods in that Maya region.
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Did the Aztecs, at their peak, have contact with the area where Maya were still living, though their civilization had declined greatly? (Almost no more monument building, no big “armies”, very few could still use the written language…) I don’t know as much about this, but it seems they must have. The Aztecs had a profound influence over big stretches of southern Mexico, even down as far as Nicaragua – military conquests, trading relationships, even outright colonies, which you can see today in the form of Nahuatl (Aztec) place names all over the place, and pockets of Nahua speakers even today in places like El Salvador (the Pipil). They didn’t seem to have as much contact with flat-hot-country Yucatan Maya – it seems the Aztecs preferred highlands – but they must have mixed it up with a few by-that-time-rather-isolated Guatemalan Maya peoples.
However, the group of people who became the Aztec were NOT the same people who populated Teotihaucan. The Aztec were upstart warriors-for-hire from the north who came to dominate further south than their original geographic homeland. Teotihuacan was long abandoned by this time. Although the Aztec came to revere Teotihuacan as a great ancient state, the two ethnic groups were not connected.
The identity of the original inhabitants of Teotihuacan remains a mystery.
In Gary Jennings’s wonderful historical novel Aztec, which I highly recommend and which takes place in the decades before the Spanish arrived, the Mayans as an organized and powerful society were long gone, but the ruins of their cities still remained, and there were still people of identifiably Mayan ancestry around. The Aztecs had as many legends about the Mayan civilization as we do about, say, the Greek gods.
It might be mentioned that the Aztecs, or related people, traded well down the coast of Central America. A group called the Sigua that were present in western Caribbean Panama were Nahuatl speakers and may have represented a settlement of traders from the Mexican region.
Colibri, I’m ahead of you, bro! (See post #3, last paragraph). But thanks for your specific example…interesting.
Elendil’s Heir, you needn’t go back in the past, or in any book, to hang out with a Maya peoples. Just fly to Cancun or Merida (both on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico), and drive a couple miles away from the city. Maya language speakers all over the place – living in houses, eating the food, and following many of the traditions of their anscestors who populated the same area at the time of the Aztecs and the Spanish Conquest.
Finally, I think this might be Post #1000 for me. A toast to all of you.