Hugo Grotius

Hugo de Groot, known by the Latin name Grotius, was born in Delft in the Dutch Republic and was a famous child prodigy who entered the University of Leiden at eleven. At fifteen he accompanied a Dutch embassy to the king of France, who called him the miracle of Holland. He became a lawyer and official, and in The Free Sea of 1609 argued that the oceans were open to all nations for trade. Caught up in a fierce religious and political dispute in the Netherlands, he was arrested in 1618 and sentenced to life imprisonment in Loevestein Castle. In 1621 his wife, Maria van Reigersberch, helped him escape hidden in a chest meant for carrying books. He fled to Paris, where in 1625 he published The Rights of War and Peace, which argued that natural law, grounded in human nature and reason, binds all nations, that war is just only for certain causes, and that even in war there are limits on conduct. He died in 1645 after a shipwreck.

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Faith: Dutch Protestant who sided with reformers against orthodox Calvinists and worked for Christian unity. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy