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.