Balance of Power and Freedom of the Seas

The early modern debate over the freedom of the seas which eventually led to Hugo Grotius’s Mare liberum (1609) was, as some contemporaries recognized, just a reprise of a much older controversy about the imperial claims to universal jurisdiction and the need to counterbalance the establishment of a monarchia universalis. ¹ In late sixteenth-century Europe, these issues were more than simply matters of legal theory or the basis for debates in law schools. In Elizabethan England there was a widespread conviction that the Spanish colonial empire was poised to dominate not only the continent of Europe but the New World and the oceans as well. It was an Italian Protestant lawyer, Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), religious exile in England and close friend of Richard Hakluyt, who connected the debate over the freedom of the seas with the concept of the balance of power, formulated in the political turmoil of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy by Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini.