ABSTRACT
Navies were embraced most enthusiastically by the northern monarchies which adopted Lutheranism and by England in its own split from Rome and its wars against France in the 1540s. Open, violent competition characterised European affairs, as the Habsburg–Valois wars with France in the early sixteenth century reveal. The sixteenth century was a period of considerable escalation in warfare and, alongside the substantial growth in army size and in the scale and length of the conflicts that were fought at the sieges and on the battlefields of Europe, there was a parallel pressure to develop strength at sea. Escalating naval warfare was momentarily extended beyond European waters to the Azores because the key European issues were briefly located there. For historians, therefore, an emphasis on embryonic, modern institutional developments and relative state power is perhaps not as relevant as an understanding of this political appropriation of naval power to the princely conduct of war.
