Grotius' two major treatises on the law of nations - De jure praedae and De jure belli ac pacis - both had the discussion of the just war doctrine as the backbone to their structure and argument. Whereas the older treatise was construed to argue the justice and legality of the taking of a Portuguese ship in East Indian waters, the more mature work aimed at a systematic exposition of the laws regulating the starting, waging and ending of war. Grotius offered a novel reading of the just war doctrine by rewriting it into the key of his general legal theory and his doctrine of natural rights as subjective rights under commutative justice. This chapter analyses Grotius' reframing o the just war doctrine and his re-systematisation of late-medieval and Renaissance legacies of theologians, canonists and civilians into a new doctrine of jus ad bellum, also giving some attention to its effect for the legal process of peace-making.

The laws of war, as expounded by Grotius, resulted from an interplay of natural law and the voluntary law (or law of nations), which was a customary law based on state practice.Important ways in which the voluntary law departed from natural law were in according equal rights to belligerents in war, without regard to the justices of the respective causes.The predominant principle governing the conduct of war was necessity, which had both a permissive and a restrictive character.Grotius was a firm supporter of moderation in the exercise of the rights of belligerency.This worked particularly to the benefit of civilians and prisoners of war.He insisted that principles of good faith must operate in war, so that perfidious acts were prohibited, though ordinary ruses of war were allowed.The voluntary law, to Grotius, allowed the unlimited taking of property belonging to enemy nationals.Grotius also gave careful attention to modern concerns such as targeted killing.An important contributions was to lay the groundwork for the law of neutrality, setting out rules on the treatment of neutral-owned property in war and on the treatment of enemy-owned property in the custody of neutrals.

The present article examines Grotius’ views on the relationship between church and state. He composed most of the works dealing exclusively with this theme in the years before 1618, but his later work is discussed as well. The historical and intellectual background to Grotius’ views is examined, such as the Dutch religious troubles, toleration, Jewish history and Erastianism. This is followed by Grotius’ general views on church and state as expressed in his works and his views on specific aspects, such as lawgiving, the right of resistance by the church, synods, ecclesiastical hierarchy, divine and natural law. It is concluded that Grotius held that there is only one, indivisible sovereign government, and that this is civil government: all external acts in the public space are subject to the sovereign. Abuse of this absolute power is restricted by the fact that the sovereign has to render account to God. Grotius’ lifelong ideal was that of a state based on these principles, with a Christian public church, where toleration of religious differences was practised.

Contracts must be regulated by equality, which stipulates that the party who has obtained less because of an inequality shall have a right of action. Grotius proposed a broad concept of equality, which concerns various elements: acts preceding the conclusion of a contract, the principal act, and the subject matter of the agreement. Grotius’s teachings on the law of treaties reflect those illustrated for promises and contracts, but also encompass some differences. For example, Grotius does not condemn treaties with unequal terms.

Grotius lived through a time of great upheaval in Europe as well as in his country of birth, the Dutch Republic. The religious, political and constitutional convulsions that struck the Republic destroyed Grotius' career but also, in combination with fundamental changes in the intellectual outlook of early seventeenth-century Europe formed his views of God, nature, society, politics and law. This chapter introduces the extraordinary polymath Grotius was from the perspective of this background and offers a map to the five parts of this volume, and their respective chapters.

Hugo Grotius is considered one of the paradigmatic figures in international relations theory.His thought is often contrasted with that of Thomas Hobbes, who is portrayed as the standard bearer of political realism, and the universalist orientation of Immanuel Kant.The centre piece of the so-called Grotian tradition is the theory of international society, which accommodates the claims of independent states without granting them absolute justification.The pursuit of advantage is subject to common standards that oblige rather than merely counsel moderation and restraint.The chapter proceeds in three parts.Part one examines the legal and political narratives that account for the emergence of the Grotian tradition.Part two examines revisionist scholarship that considers Grotius’ thought in the context of relations between Europeans and non-European ‘others’.Neither the standard nor the revisionist narrative provides an adequate account of obligation, without which the theory of international society collapses in confusion.Part three responds to this problem by exploring a part of Grotius’ thought that has been excised from international relations theory: theology.This illuminates an account of obligation that rescues the Grotian tradition from the coarse world of moral scepticism and power politics.

In this chapter five main themes emerge with respect to the historiographical side of Grotius' works: (1) the polarity between constitutionalism and patriotism on the one hand, and reason of state and Scepticism on the other; (2) Grotius’ ‘secularising’ reading of history; (3) the close correlation between scholarship and politics; (4) Grotius’ use of sources and his relation to contemporary developments in Antiquarianism; and (5) the important role of historical perspectives in his other works such as De Jure Belliand the Annotationeson the New Testament.

To expound the law relating to war was a primary purpose of Hugo Grotius in the writing of his famous treatise, De jure belli ac pacis (1625). In Grotius’ opinion, a ‘very serious error’ had taken hold of the popular mind, to the effect that there was no law regulating the manner in which the combatants went about their deadly business. The events of the Thirty Years War, raging in central Europe at the time the book was written, could easily have given rise to such a notion. Be that as it may, one of Grotius’ central concerns was to refute this pernicious misconception. Even in time of war, he insisted, the opposing sides remain part of a common moral community, governed by the general law of nature, and also by the body of customary and contractual law known as the law of nations.

This Chapter’s objective is to present Grotius’ literary writings as an integral part of his intellectual legacy and to highlight its pertinence to the understanding of his social tenets and moral programme. It addresses this objective from two perspectives, by verifying the heavy moral and political overtones of Grotius’ literary outpourings and by falsifying claims as to the irrelevance, let alone anomaly of the literary input in his legal and political writings. To prove its point, the paper establishes the programmatic overlap of both domains throughout Grotius’ life. It closely links the literary themes from his early years, whether as a playwright or historiographer, to the political bottlenecks of the Dutch Revolt and the socio-religious riddles of the Remonstrant Troubles. It underpins its thesis with reference to Grotius’ later plays on fratricide and exile as reflecting on the pits and peaks of his dramatic personal life. Finally, it identifies the intellectual epitome of Grotius’ literary outpouring in his comprehensive programme to salvage the Greek literary tradition in the social maelstrom of his times, a fitting counterpart to his ambitions to lay down a legal framework of universal appliance and a creed to serve all Christian denominations.

The purpose of this introductory sketch is to offer a biographical frame that helps the reader to place the articles in this companion in their historical context. The overview of Grotius’ life contains the most important chronological facts, publications and professional occupations that gave shape to his personal, political and scholarly career. Special attention is paid to his research in the fields of law, philology, ecclesiastical politics and exegesis. Much of the information gathered here is to be found in Henk Nellen, Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). A lifelong struggle for peace in Church and State (Leiden: Brill, 2014), but in order to avoid falling back into a downright summary of this biography some new material has been included. The story of Grotius’ eventful life is told along lines offered by a triptych of friendships that determined his scholarly efforts to a large extent: he successively kept close relations with Daniel Heinsius, who rivalled with him in many literary activities, Gerardus Joannes Vossius who assisted him in realizing his political-theological objectives, and Denis Pétau who advised him on his exegetical works. A succinct description of Grotius’ Nachleben serves to show that long after his death his theological works attracted an international readership and enjoyed an acclaim that is comparable to the one he attained in the fields of natural law and international law.

This chapter investigates Grotius’s broader intellectual involvement with the doctrine of predestination. Grotius deliberately renounced the religious importance of predestination as he called for religious concord in a time of fierce inter-confessional strife in the United Provinces - an endeavour that almost cost him his life. Considering his abhorrence for religious dogmas about divine predestination and human free will, two of his writings, Meletius and Ordinum pietas, display a remarkable restraint on Grotius’s part on the matter. Social and political order was not to be found in unrelenting dogmatic questions of certainty about what Grotius’s viewed as theologically non-essential religious principles. Rather it required a commitment to religious toleration. This chapter argues that Grotius’s involvement in the Dutch predestination debates reveals important philosophical connections between his religious and political ideas and allows for further explication of two central aspects of Grotius’s political theory: natural sociability and the impious hypothesis. From a careful contextualisation of predestination in Grotius’s religious oeuvre, emerges an account of socialisation independent of the predestination question, and establishes the infamous ‘etiamsi daremus’ statement as an obligation device that served his pursuit for religious and political accord.

Written in captivity in 1619-1621 and first published in 1631, Grotius’ Inleidinge tot de Hollandsche Rechts-geleertheyd was the first-ever comprehensive introductory textbook on Hollandic (private) law and jurisprudence in the Dutch language. It became one of the key and even founding texts in the tradition of Roman-Dutch law. This contribution first focuses on the writing and publication process, as well as on the aim, style and structure of the work. Afterwards, the main ideas of the Inleidinge on the law of persons, property law and the law of obligations are summarized. Finally, the fate and influence of the Inleidinge after Grotius’ death are briefly highlighted.

Grotius’s theory of property was meant to yield practical results. The principle of the freedom of the seas, for instance, was based on the idea of seizure as a constituent element of property and exclusivity. This focus on practical results enables a secularized reading of his theory of property. However, some essential aspects of his property theory are not entirely comprehensible without taking into account Grotius’s wider theological framework. Therefore, in this article I will focus on Grotius’s idea of consent to the principle of first occupation as the foundation of his property theory, and link it with his theologically loaded conceptions of man’s freedom and equality, or the universal fellowship of humankind.