A Brill Calendar: April 9

"Pax Hispanica"

Few motivations to end a war are as pedestrian as the consideration that peace can lead to better profits than combat.

The Greek god Hermes and his Roman alter ego Mercury bestow on flocks worshiping and adoring them more elementary, but more lasting blessings than those given by Ares and Mars. An armistice signed April 9 1609 in Antwerp, Headquarters of Habsburg Spain in the European Delta, between the Republic of the Seven Provinces and its mighty opponent is a fine example of this deliberation. In that city it is gracefully commemorated exactly four centuries later.

Both parties promised solemnly to abstain from all fighting for the following twelve years. Both kept their promises punctually, like gentlemen & aristocrats should. Hostilities were opened again April 20, 1621. This start of a period of 12 years – one for each Christian Apostle – traditionally known in Spanish historiography as the ‘Pax Hispanica’ and in the Low Countries as the ‘Twelve Years Truce’ – a subtle difference – is not only an ‘annus mirabilis’ in international diplomacy and statecraft. It may also be seen, for reasons intimately connected with it, as the birth of modern international law.

In this very year, 1609, Leyden alumnus Hugo de Groot, ‘Grotius’ to learned Europe, published chapter of a much larger book (to be completed only sixteen years later) under the title ‘Mare Liberum’, defending the idea of free access to the world’s oceans for each and every nation.

It is seldom that a work replete with juridical reasoning has enjoyed so wide a circulation and readership beyond the circle of academicians serving the Lady Iustitia. In an era torn by violent and sometimes bloody dissent on religious affairs, in which quite a few fine minds advocated supremacy of the Church over all worldly matters, Grotius’s perspective that nations are bound to natural law, an entity based on Mankind’s unalienable nature - and in no possible way dependent on Divine Intervention - is a ‘Giant Leap Forward’.