Hugo Grotius

Hugo Grotius, or Huig de Groot (1583-1645), Dutch jurist, humanist, and statesman, whose legal writings laid the foundation for modern international law.

Born April 10, 1583, in Delft, Grotius was writing Latin elegies at the age of eight and entered the Leiden University when he was 12 years old. In 1598 he served on a mission to Henry IV of France and stayed on to study law at Orléans. Returning to Holland in 1599, he began the practice of law. In 1607 he was appointed attorney general of the province of Holland.

Grotius's first published work on international law, Mare Liberum (The Free Sea, 1609), challenged the right of any nation to claim any part of the open sea as exclusively its own. Such a claim, Grotius argued, was against natural law and the basic law of humanity. He took the same line of argument in his De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625): that war violates natural law, which applies to the conduct of nations and of individuals. His contention was that war can be condoned only if it is for a righteous cause and conciliation has failed, and he called for humanitarian limits on such warfare.

Earlier, his efforts to moderate a bitter doctrinal dispute among Dutch Calvinists had embroiled him in a political clash between his province of Holland and the rest of the Dutch Republic and its orthodox majority. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1619 but escaped to Paris in 1621. There he finished De Veritate Religionis Christianae (On the Truth of the Christian Religion, 1627), a nonsectarian statement of basic Christian beliefs that was widely translated and won Grotius great acclaim. His voluminous writings included other theological and legal works as well as poetry, histories, and classical translations.

Grotius returned to Holland in 1631, only to have to flee again in 1632. He became Sweden's ambassador to Paris in 1634 and served in that post until 1644. After a visit to Sweden in 1644-45, he was sailing home when his ship foundered on the Pomeranian coast. He died of his injuries two days later, August 28, 1645, in Rostock (in present-day Germany).