Later life of Hugo Grotius

Prince Maurice died in 1625, and in 1631 Grotius returned to Holland. After intense debate in the States of Holland, Grotius was again threatened with arrest. In 1632 he went to Hamburg, then the centre of Franco-Swedish diplomatic relations. In 1634 the Swedish chancellor, Axel, Count Oxenstierna, offered him the position of Swedish ambassador in Paris. Grotius accepted the appointment and Swedish citizenship. He settled again in Paris, but his life as a diplomat was not as successful as his life as a scholar.

In 1636–37 he worked on the Historia Gotthorum, Vandalorum et Langobardorum (“History of the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards”). He showed great interest in the reunification of the Christian church and published a number of works dealing with this subject. He also revised, again and again, De Jure Belli ac Pacis; the last edition including his own revision was published in 1646, shortly after his death. On the other hand, Grotius was not appointed to be a negotiator at the important peace conferences of Münster and Osnabrück that finally resulted in the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War. In 1644 Grotius was relieved of his post of ambassador in Paris. After consultations with Queen Christina, he left Stockholm for Lübeck on Aug. 12, 1645, but was shipwrecked on the coast of eastern Pomerania. The great man, great not only in the history of international law but also in natural law, civil law, criminal law, and modern humanities, soon died of exhaustion at Rostock.

Legacy

Grotius designed his theory to apply not only to states but also to rulers and subjects of law in general. De Jure Belli ac Pacis thus proved useful in the later development of theories of both private and criminal law. It is in the area of international law, however, that Grotius’s masterpiece has been most influential. Its general normative framework provided a foundation to constitute and regulate relations between emerging sovereign states, which became the basic units of modern international society.

Non-European civilizations also had developed norms and institutions for regulating the behaviour of independent powers in their own regions (e.g., the siyar in Islamic civilization and the Sino-centric tributary system in East Asia). However, many of these civilizations had been subjugated by the European colonial powers by the end of the 19th century. Thus, European international law became global international law, and Grotius’s influence accordingly was magnified on a global scale. Although long regarded as the “father of international law”—and his importance has been undeniable and lasting—this title is misleading; instead, Grotius was one of many “fathers” of European international law, and European international law is just one of many historically coexisting regional normative systems.