Emperor Charles VI of Habsburg laid the foundations of absolutist centralization and a precise mercantilist strategy that led a Central European, markedly terrestrial reality to aspire to the role of maritime power. Following in her father's footsteps, Maria Theresa, absolute protagonist of the season of eighteenth-century enlightened reformism, undertook to expand imperial mercantile traffic in the Adriatic and towards the East and, above all, to support them with an adequate apparatus of maritime law, culminating in the promulgation of the Editto Politico di Navigazione Mercantile austriaca (Political Edict of Austrian Merchant Shipping) of 1774. Destined to remain in force until the twentieth century, it represents the initial design of a more complete Austrian "Sea Code", which was pursued for over a century by subsequent Emperors and nevertheless remained a chimera. This paper intends to examine the provisions aimed at promoting the religious and moral discipline of the crew, which can be found in the main sources of Habsburg maritime law. These provisions take on a special relevance as a form of social cohesion in a doubly peculiar context, given by the naval community, on the one hand, and by its varied ethnic, confessional and linguistic composition, on the other. The latter constitutes the reflection of a multi-faceted geopolitical reality, that of the Habsburg Empire, which can be taken as a historical laboratory to reflect on the challenges of our contemporaneity