Hugo Grotius

Hugo Grotius is remembered as the father of international law, but the title undersells the drama of his life. Born in 1583 in Delft during the Eighty Years' War, he wrote Latin verse at eight and entered Leiden at eleven. By his early twenties he was an attorney and humanist who corresponded with kings.

The pivotal commission arrived in 1603. Jacob van Heemskerck had captured the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina in the Strait of Singapore for the Dutch East India Company. The legal status of the prize was politically explosive, and the Company asked the young Grotius to defend it. The manuscript De Indis went unpublished, but he extracted its twelfth chapter as Mare Liberum (1609). The thesis was bold for the age of empire: the sea is no nation's property, and all may traffic upon it. Modern freedom of the seas descends directly from this argument.

In 1613 he was appointed pensionary of Rotterdam and entered politics during the bitter struggle between strict Calvinists and Arminians. He sided with the Arminians and lost. In 1619 the Synod of Dort sentenced him to life imprisonment at Loevestein Castle. In 1621 his wife Maria smuggled him out hidden inside a book chest, and he escaped to Paris.

In exile, sustained by a French royal pension, he produced his greatest work. As the Thirty Years' War tore Christendom apart in 1625, De Jure Belli ac Pacis appeared. He turned to natural law and wrote that this law would hold even on the impossible supposition that there were no God (etiamsi daremus non esse Deum). That cut the umbilical cord between theology and natural law, giving modern jurisprudence its starting point.

Later years took him into Swedish service as Queen Christina's ambassador. He sought reconciliation between the warring Christian confessions. In 1645, after a shipwreck off the German coast, he died at Rostock. The descent from Grotius to Hobbes, Locke and Pufendorf is direct; through them, to the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.