This volume presents the Mediterranean as a crucial part of the social and cultural fabric of
the early modern Habsburg world. The sea was a stage on which Habsburg history was made and
unmade. The Habsburg Mediterranean was a space where constant changes and exchanges took place
touching hierarchies power-relationships commerce and the everyday actions of people. The
cases in point focus on the significance of the Mediterranean as a site of transporting ideas
people plants animals and objects. These flows drew the Iberian and Central European branches
of the Habsburg dynasty into overlapping mutually interactive and at times competing
relations.
