AbstractWe establish a global well‐posedness of mild solutions to the three‐dimensional, incompressible Navier‐Stokes equations if the initial data are in the space ${\cal{X}}^{-1}$ defined by \input amssym ${\cal{X}}^{‐1} = \{f \in {\cal{D}}^\prime(R^3): \int_{{\Bbb{R}}^3}|\xi|^{‐1}|\widehat{f}|d\xi < \infty\}$ and if the norms of the initial data in ${\cal{X}}^{-1}$ are bounded exactly by the viscosity coefficient μ. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.