On the morning of 10 July 1555, the guard at El Morro, an observation post at the entrance of Havana’s bay, raised a flag indicating the approach of a vessel. As was customary in these cases, the commander of the town’s small fortress reproduced the message by placing a flag in the fortress tower, where townspeople could see it. Commander Juan de Lobera also ordered artillery to fire. It was the sign for the eight or nine town residents who guarded the fortress to gather and for the populace to know that there was “a sail in the sea.” The...

Before studying the town and its people, we must turn to the sea and consider the dozens of ships that came through every year. These ships gave life to Havana, which by the mid-sixteenth century was an Atlantic port city in the making. Ships brought consumers, merchants, products, and business to town. They were the engines that propelled the local economy and the reason that the crown spent millions of reales to fortify the port. Through these ships Havana was linked to the wider Atlantic, where peoples and products from virtually all corners of the globe were being constantly shuffled....

Although many of the ships and convoys returning to Seville from Mexico and Tierra Firme since the 1530s and 1540s used Havana as a stopover, it was with the organization of the fleet system in the 1560s that the port town was permanently identified as the only point in the Americas where both fleets would gather before crossing the Atlantic. As a political act designed to fulfill the needs of the crown of Castile, the organization of the Carrera de Indias had little to do with the residents of Havana. Rather, it reflected the monopolistic dreams of the crown and...

Havana’s defense rested not only on the strength of its permanent garrison, its forts, the chain locking the bay, and the galleys that tried to keep enemy vessels away. It rested primarily on its population, which, up to the last quarter of the sixteenth century, was quite small. In purely demographic terms, the attack by Jacques de Sorés in 1555 had produced a clear lesson: unless it was endowed with a larger population, the key to the New World could be easily seized by Spain’s enemies.

Mid-sixteenth-century documents convey a sense of urgency concerning the need to enlarge the population...

It was in the second half of the sixteenth century, with the consolidation of Havana as an urban center with increasingly complex commercial, military, and administrative functions, that the port city created a hinterland to serve its needs. This hinterland came to be known astierra adentro, a construct that of course placed Havana and its port at the very entrance of the island. The agriculturally rich region that developed around the town during this period responded in various ways to the opportunities and challenges posed by the growing movement of ships and consumers. Some farms specialized in the production...

On 2 April 1600, the navíoSan Antoniodocked at Havana harbor after a two-monthlong trip from Luanda. Although it had become increasingly common for ships from the distant African continent to call to port, the arrival of theSan Antoniowas something of an event. After all, it had been more than two years since the arrival of the last slave ship from the African coasts. Smaller groups of slaves were being constantly imported from Cartagena de Indias, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and other points in the Caribbean, but the 195 slaves aboard theSan Antoniorepresented a significant...

A law of the Siete Partidas summarized elites’ views about social stratification and order in medieval Castile. The main division instatus hominumwas between free and servile, but there were important “graduations” among the free as well, depending on wealth, family, legitimacy of birth, religion, and of course gender. “Men of noble descent are honored and judged, in another way from those of inferior rank, and priests from laymen, and legitimate children from bastards, and Christians from Moors and Jews. Moreover, the condition of a man is superior to that of a woman in many things and in many...

The Havana of the early seventeenth century was a very different place than the town that Jacques de Sorés occupied and destroyed in 1555. The city had grown in size, population, and complexity. In 1555 Havana was a coastal town that lacked basic urban functions, from a school or a monastery to a customhouse. Its lack of population and inadequate defenses made it an easy prey for foreign predators, who attacked the town in 1538, 1543, and twice in 1555. Civilian and religious authorities lived elsewhere on the island and stayed away from the town, which had mosquitoes in abundance...