ABSTRACT
Recent studies of the concept of seapower call attention to the importance of knowing more about the era of transition from the Mediterranean naval strategy of the Italian city states to that of the seventeenth-century Atlantic powers. This chapter presents a study that focuses on Habsburg Netherlands' precedents for the more developed naval strategy of the Dutch Republic. If the notion that there were two distinct phases in the development of a "Mahariian" doctrine of naval warfare, the obvious gap that needs filling in concerns the period in between-the high point of the "Mediterranean" system of warfare and the Anglo-Dutch wars of the second half of the seventeenth century. The chapter aims to fill the gap, at least partially, by exploring strategies developed by the Habsburg government for the defense of Low Countries shipping in the North Sea during the reign of Charles V.
