Neptune and the Netherlands: State, Economy, and War at Sea in the Renaissance (review)

Louis Sicking, a maritime historian at the University of Leiden, has previously written Zeemacht en Onmacht, a scholarly coffee-table book covering much of the ground of the current volume. With Neptune and the Netherlands, he now offers English-language readers an important contribution to early modern naval history.

The title requires amplification on three points. First, Sicking does not have an expansive view of the period covered by the Renaissance. His study is limited to a period of about eighty years from the 1480s to 1561. He thus stops short of the Dutch Revolt, which plays no part in his narrative.

Secondly, by the Netherlands Sicking refers to a region that emphatically includes Flanders. Indeed, if the book can be said to have a polemical purpose, it is to bring the southern provinces into the orbit of Dutch history. Sicking argues that the separation of Belgian and Dutch history in this period is anachronistic. In this he is undoubtedly correct—though, as he himself shows, the differences that would lead to the separation of the northern and southern provinces were already becoming apparent.

Thirdly, war at sea, in the sense of combat and the clash of arms, is largely absent from this book. Sicking describes himself as a maritime rather than as a naval historian, and he approaches war at sea from the standpoint of what it has in common with other maritime activities. Fisheries receive far more attention than artillery. For the time and place of his study this is appropriate. War at sea, as Sicking depicts it, was mostly a matter of attacking and protecting maritime commerce and fisheries. Not only was it not an age of great fleet actions; the fleets to fight them did not yet exist, nor did the states of northern Europe yet have the resources to build them. The attempt to build a permanent war fleet is one of the book's themes, and its abandonment in 1561 marks the terminus of Sicking's narrative.

The two Ordinances on the Admiralty of 1488 and 1540, and the institution they created, provide the framework of Sicking's tale, but he ranges well beyond this to include nearly all aspects of maritime policy. The main theme is the growing divergence of interests and aims between Holland and Flanders (with Zeeland somewhere in the middle), and of both (but particularly Holland) with the Habsburg government. Flanders, whose commerce depended largely on the carriage of high-quality goods, favored a defensive strategy based on convoys, while Holland sought a more aggressive naval strategy that would take war to the enemy. As Sicking explains, such a strategy was beyond the means available at the time, but one can see here the seeds of Dutch naval strategy in the seventeenth century.

In such a long book, there are some curious omissions. Sicking keeps his focus resolutely on administration, geopolitics, and economics. Religion plays only a minor part in his narrative. The impact of the Reformation on geopolitics is not entirely ignored, but it is not emphasized either. Sicking seems to regard economic issues as the principal source of dispute between the provinces and the central government, as well as between the provinces themselves. The result, perhaps not intended, is to give his argument a slight air of economic determinism.

Sicking's other books have been profusely illustrated. The current volume has no illustrations apart from a small but well-chosen selection of color plates. The maps, however, are not really adequate. The few that are included lack detail and are hard to read. The inclusion of more and better maps would have made...