This chapter interrogates how local memory was mobilized and militarized by the viceroyalty to legitimize its authority in the face of growing popular resistance. It centers on the reuse of the Norman imperial palace, the Palazzo Reale, at mid-century and its protracted modernization, which, in turn, paved the way for the rebuilding of the Porta d’Africa and the Porta Nuova, two centuries-old city gates closely associated with contemporary Habsburg campaigns in North Africa. In Palermo, appropriation laid the foundations of a new architecture of power: one built on an emergent ideology of empire that balanced the rhetoric of triumphalism with the recognition of local mythography. Looking to local political discourse that claimed the city’s historical autonomy, the chapter contrasts these projects with contemporary acts of colonial foundation in the Crown’s American viceroyalties. In doing so, it situates Palermo within a newly global Habsburg imperial imaginary.