Hugo Grotius: The Father of International Law and the Freedom of the Seas

Hugo de Groot was born in Delft on April 10, 1583, to a patrician family. After studies at different universities, including that in Leiden, he became a member of the diplomatic mission sent from the Dutch government to the court of King Henri IV in France in 1598. A year later he became a lawyer in The Hague. By 1601 he was offered the post of official historiographer of the States of Holland. During this time, Grotius was a close associate of Dutch statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547-1619), who served as the chief minister for the States of Holland. This relationship greatly influenced Grotius's career: he became councilor (counsel) in 1605; advocaat fiscal (public prosecutor) of Holland, Zeeland, and Frise in 1607; and ultimately Pensionary of Rotterdam in 1613. In 1608, he married Maria van Reigersberch (1589-1653), the daughter of a mayor of the city of Veere in Zeeland, with whom he had eight children.

His involvement in the religious and political disputes in the Dutch Republic between 1607 and 1621 led him to be imprisoned. Although he managed to escape from prison, Grotius was banished from the Netherlands. Following his banishment, Grotius moved to Paris, where he received a pension from King Louis XIII. He tried to return to the Netherlands in 1631, but he was not allowed to stay, and he definitively left his country in 1632. He was then employed as ambassador of Sweden through King Gustavus Adolphu.

It was during a return voyage to Sweden that the ship carrying Grotius wrecked outside Kaschuben. Grotius later fell ill while traveling overland to Rostock and died there on August 28, 1645. Though his body was brought back to the Netherlands and was entombed in the Nieuwe Kerk at Delft, his heart and intestines were buried in Rostock.

Portrait of Hugo Grotius, by Michiel Jansz von Mierevelt, 1631 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Grotius was a prolific writer and one of the preeminent jurists of maritime law. In 1603, the Dutch East India Company seized the wealth-laden Portuguese merchant vessel Santa Catarina off the coast of Singapore. Grotius was commissioned by the Dutch East India Company to write a legal justification of the seizure of Santa Catarina against Portuguese claims for the return of the ship and its valuable cargo. He began working on the case in 1604, and sections of his defense were later included in his De jure praedae (The Law of Prize and Booty).

Chapter 12 of this volume, De Mare Liberum (On the Freedom of the Seas), was later published anonymously and eventually would became Grotius's most well- known work. In this work, Grotius broke with traditional practice by declaring the seas open to all nations for their seaborne trade rather than territories of exclusive national interest. This radical view was quickly criticized by other authors like the Portuguese Serafim de Freitas (1570-1633), the Scottish William Welwood (1578-1622), and the English John Selden (1584-1654), who sought to return at least part of the oceans to national control. Despite the number of detractors, the impact of Mare Liberum could be felt until the second half of the twentieth century.

In 1625, Hugo de Groot went on to write another important work, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (Three Books on the Law of War and Peace), which was dedicated to the king of France, Louis XIII. In this book, Grotius sought to minimize the conflicts plaguing the region in this period by establishing a general theory of law, based on idea of natural law, that could contain and regulate wars between states. This work, much like Mare Liberum, provided an important point of departure for the still ongoing discussions on the legitimization of war and peace.

It is through these two works on maritime law and the justification of war that Grotius emerges as one of the most important legal experts of his time. Roberto Barazzutti

FURTHER READING:Borschberg, Peter. 2011. Hugo Grotius, The Portuguese, and Free Trade in the East Indies. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.

Thornton, Helen. 2004. “Hugo Grotius and the Freedom of the Seas.” International Journal of Maritime History 16: 17-38.

van Ittersum, Martine Julia. 2007. “Mare Liberum in the West-Indies? Hugo Grotius and the Case of the Swimming Lion, a Dutch Pirate in the Caribbean at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century.” Itinerario 3 (3): 59-94.

Viera, Monica Brito. 2003. “Mare Liberum vs. Mare Clausum: Grotius, Freitas, and Selden’s Debate on the Dominium over the Seas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64: 361-77.