Cities of Empire: Mexico and Bahia in the Sixteenth Century

In the Renaissance, colonization and exploitation followed soon after travel and discovery. Spaniards and Portuguese were the van? guard of this movement in the Atlantic world, and it is not sur? prising that the city was among the institutions brought by them as part of their cultural heritage.1 What makes the story of the urban conquest of Latin America particularly interesting are the specific configurations of society in the cities of empire and the conscious use of the city as a symbol of imperium. The objective of this paper is to analyze the functions and social organization of two of these cities, Mexico City and Salvador da Bahia, and to demonstrate that despite a variety of often striking differences, the social structures of both reflected similar solutions to the common