Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Dutch jurist and founder of international law. Grotius was born at Delft and at just 11 years of age went to university at Leiden. He became an advocate in 1599. In 1603 a Portuguese ship was captured by a Dutch privateer. The legal wranglings that followed resulted in Grotius' book De Indis, a treatise on the natural principles of justice applied to the case. In Mare Liberum of 1609 Grotius proposed that the seas were international territory and all nations were free to use them. In 1618 he was arrested during religious and political struggles in Holland, but escaped in 1621 and settled in France. In 1625 he published the three-volume work on natural law and justice, De jure belli ac pacis, which was hugely influential on the later formation of international law. This engraving comes from van Meurs' Illustris Academia Lugd-Batava, printed at Leiden in 1613.