In the sixteenth century, the Hapsburg dynasty leveraged burgeoning technologies of print to appropriate an antique Roman ceremony known as the triumph. In collaboration with leading artists and scholars of the day, Hapsburg rulers created documents of triumphal performances that were also themselves performative documents, casting the Hapsburgs as inheritors of imperial Rome, while reimagining the idea of empire itself for a newly globalized world. By looking at three case studies that frame the life and reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1549), I argue that the Hapsburgs drew on new capacities to reproduce text and images to localize their arguments through verbal and visual cues that appealed to audiences’ regional pride and emergent national imaginaries. By virtue of these performative documents – when their complex rhetorical cues were effective – diverse reading publics throughout the transatlantic Empire could participate in political rituals translated across language, space, and time.