Did Yucatán get its name from a Maya phrase for I don't understand you?
When Spanish explorers reached the Yucatán Peninsula in 1517 and asked what the land was called, the replies may have been a puzzled I don't understand you. That is one of three competing stories for the name. Another has the Maya remarking hear how they talk, and a third links it to yuca.
The friar Toribio de Benavente Motolinía was probably the first to write down the misunderstanding version, reporting that coastal people answered every question with a word meaning I don't understand, which the Spaniards garbled into Yucatán. The chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo preferred a food explanation: the land of yucas, a staple crop of the Maya. Before any of this, the region was called Mayab, meaning flat in Yucatec Maya, which is where the word Maya itself comes from.
The peninsula was the heartland of Maya civilisation at its peak. Maya groups arrived from the Petén around 250 CE, and cities such as Chichén Itzá, Izamal and Ek' Balam followed, along with the League of Mayapan, which broke apart around 1194 into small rival domains. Human presence goes back far earlier, with traces in the Loltún caves from the end of the ice age.
Francisco Hernández de Córdoba's expedition made landfall on March 1, 1517, but conquest took decades. Francisco de Montejo failed in 1527 to 1528 and again in 1531 to 1535, so his son founded Mérida on January 6, 1542, on the ruins of the Maya city of T'ho, reusing its stones. In 1761 a Maya named Jacinto Canek led a revolt that was quickly crushed; his town of Cisteil was burned and salted as a warning.
Distance from Mexico City bred independence. Yucatán declared its break from Spain on September 15, 1821, joined Mexico, and then on March 16, 1841, broke away again as the Republic of Yucatán, raising the only flag its authorities ever officially flew. The brutal Caste War pushed it to seek help and rejoin Mexico in 1848. Campeche was later carved out as its own state, and in 1902 more territory went to what became Quintana Roo.
Source: Yucatán
