The father of international law escaped prison inside a chest of books
Hugo Grotius was jailed in Loevestein Castle over a religious feud tearing the Dutch Republic apart. He got out by hiding in the chest that regularly ferried books to his cell, and in French exile he wrote the works that helped found international law, including the case that the open sea belongs to nobody.
Born in Delft in 1583 into a patrician family, he entered Leiden University at eleven, studying under scholars such as Joseph Justus Scaliger. At 16 he published an edition of the late antique writer Martianus Capella that stayed a reference for centuries. A year earlier, on a diplomatic trip to Paris with Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Henri IV reportedly introduced him as the miracle of Holland.
His most famous argument grew out of a piece of piracy. In 1603 his cousin Jacob van Heemskerk seized a Portuguese carrack, the Santa Catarina, off what is now Singapore, without authority from company or state. When shareholders and the Portuguese objected, company representatives asked Grotius to defend the capture. His treatise, later called On the Law of Spoils, grounded the case in natural justice and the lawfulness of war generally. One chapter, printed in 1609 as Mare Liberum, held that the sea could not be owned as territory and must stay open to trade. The English jurist John Selden answered with Mare clausum, but the principle survives across much of the high seas today.
His career rose with Oldenbarnevelt's patronage, reaching Pensionary of Rotterdam in 1613. Then came the clash between followers of Jacobus Arminius, who favoured toleration, and strict Calvinists behind Franciscus Gomarus. Grotius defended the civil authorities' right to appoint university professors in a sharp 27-page pamphlet whose backlash dogged him until his arrest in 1618.
His treatise De jure belli ac pacis, offered to the French king Louis XIII, sketched a society of states bound by agreed law rather than force; Hedley Bull called him the intellectual father of the Peace of Westphalia. He also shifted thinking about rights from something attached to objects towards powers belonging to persons. His influence waned, then revived after the First World War.
Source: Hugo Grotius
