The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto

Author:Russell Shorto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781400096336
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2005-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

AN AMERICAN IN EUROPE

In January 1646 a coach, drawn by six horses, labored through the frozen ruts of a road in the German countryside. With gilt woodwork and attendants tricked out in scarlet capes and hats, it made a vivid impression against the dead landscape. Two rows of retainers rode ahead, swords at their sides. Peasants by the roadside couldn't help but gawk as the entourage passed.

Inside the coach sat a sixty-one-year-old man, his sedate attire in contrast to the grandeur of the vehicle. He had a tapered beard and sharp eyes, an expression of sad, solemn decency. Sharing the cabin with him were his wife and their granddaughter. All three of them must have been weary as they neared the end of their one-hundred-twenty-mile journey. Just now, as they rounded this bend, the steepled skyline of the city of Münster came into view.

The man's name was Adriaen Pauw. He had long been one of the most important men in the Dutch Republic, and now he was about to attempt something that, should it come to pass, would transform European history. He was quite conscious of this—so much so that he would commission the above-described painting of the moment of his arrival to document his role in history. He believed that he and his like-minded colleagues had an opportunity to redraw the rules by which nations had governed themselves for centuries, to lay a new course for politics and for human affairs.

As Pauw's carriage rumbled along, nearly every state in Europe was at war and had been for the entire lifetime of most inhabitants. Going back into the Middle Ages, it had been generally accepted that war was the natural state of nations, that a country defined itself in large part by its clashes with enemies and alliances with friends. In the early 1640s, however, one of those epochal changes of thinking began to occur in the minds of men from different nations and traditions. The new mind-set had its intellectual origins, most notably, in the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, the man who was the guiding light to Adriaen van der Donck and other law students of the era. Twenty years before, Grotius had put forth the idiosyncratic proposition that peace was the natural state of mature, civilized nations, and war ought to be considered only as a last resort, and even then should be governed by rules to which all parties subscribed. Remarkably, monarchs paused in the midst of flinging their armies at one another to read Grotius's book. King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden supposedly kept De Jure Belli ac Pacis on his person as he led his troops into battle.

Grotius's radical concept had gained momentum in the intervening years and was now decidedly in the air. The peace negotiations at Münster would be unlike anything that had come before in world history. Each envoy, in expression of his government's awareness of the magnitude of the undertaking, arrived with an entourage of knights, halberdiers, trumpeters, archers, foot soldiers, and an army of retainers; the French delegation numbered one thousand people.

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