author
Hugo Grotius
1583–1645
A brilliant Dutch thinker whose ideas helped shape modern international law, he wrote with unusual ambition about war, peace, justice, and religious conflict. His life was as dramatic as his books, including imprisonment, a daring escape, and years spent in exile and diplomacy.
4 Audiobooks
Traité de la Vérité de la Religion Chrétienne
by Hugo Grotius
Traité du Pouvoir du Magistrat Politique sur les choses sacrées
by Hugo Grotius
The Rights of War and Peace
by Hugo Grotius
About the author
Born in Delft in 1583, Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist, scholar, diplomat, theologian, and writer. A child prodigy, he studied at Leiden University while still very young and quickly built a reputation for extraordinary learning across law, classics, politics, and literature.
Grotius is best known for On the Law of War and Peace (De Jure Belli ac Pacis, 1625), a work that became a landmark in the development of international law. He also wrote on natural law, religion, history, and politics, and his ideas on how states should behave in war and peace gave later generations a lasting framework for thinking about justice between nations.
His own career was deeply tied to the religious and political struggles of the Dutch Republic. After siding with the statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt in a bitter conflict, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, escaped dramatically from Loevestein Castle, and lived for years in exile. He later served as Sweden’s ambassador to France and died in 1645, leaving behind a body of work that still matters far beyond the seventeenth century.