Although Christopher Columbus touched briefly on the coast of Honduras in, it was two decades after his initial voyage to the Americas in before Europeans began to enter the Mesoamerican world. When other Spanish expeditions followed an ill-fated crew—shipwrecked in—to Yucatan, they were turned back by Postclassic societies used to resisting invasion by neighboring groups of noble raiders. It was only after moving up the coast to the Gulf of Mexico, the edge of the Aztec tribute state, that the Spanish in were able to advance into Mesoamerican territory. Here, within the largest, most powerful, and most secure state in the region, the Spanish were received cautiously but without the automatic military rejection that Yucatec Maya states gave to the newcomers. The succeeding conquest, aided by disease, native allies, and internal weaknesses of the Aztec polity, was the last opportunity Europeans had to record observations of an intact Mesoamerican society. The fall of the Aztec state alone disrupted economic and political organization throughout Mesoamerica, and diseases spread from the initial points of Spanish entry into the region beyond the active campaigns of conquest. When the Spanish finally brought much of Guatemala, Honduras, and Yucatan under military control in the s and s, the societies they saw had already experienced massive population loss and consequent political, social, and economic turmoil. And by this time, the Spanish already had a model for understanding the