historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

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Chapter 4. Times of success. Defending the fatherland
Christian IV, who, just like his English relatives, also claimed to hold exclusive
rights on navigation and fishing in the Northern seas. 32 A greater threat
to Dutch maritime interests, however, was Christian IV’s mercantilist policy
that aimed at crippling Dutch supremacy in the Baltic. Christian IV tried to
accomplish this by raising extra toll in the Sont and by banning Dutch shipping
to Sweden and Finland. In 1614, by closing alliances with the Hanseatic
League and Sweden, Oldenbarnevelt had forced Christian IV to abandon this
path of economic warfare. But after 1630, when he had made his peace with
Spain, Christian IV returned to his aggressive mercantilist policy and once
again threatened to deliver a severe blow to Dutch shipping and trade. 33
Against this background of international tensions and maritime disputes
the republication of Grotius’s Mare Liberum in 1633 makes sense as a powerful
reminder of the Dutch claim to the freedom of the seas. Grotius’s eloquently
phrased argument that the sea was by its very nature free because it could
not be permanently occupied nor enclosed with an increase of utility as a
positive result was a powerful argument that could be used against the pretensions
of both Charles I and Christian IV. The more so, since Grotius had
provided the Dutch with an array of examples and quotations taken from the
Bible, the classics, and modern jurists like the Spaniard Fernando Vázquez de
Menchaca (1512-1569) to use as rhetorical weapons with whom they could
bombard their opponents. 34
Boxhorn’s Apologia and the copy of the Magnus Intercursus supplied the
Dutch with another kind of weapon to defend their maritime interests: historical
documentation. Boxhorn’s defence of Dutch maritime interests comes in
the form of a refutation of the Dutch historian Pontus Heuterus (1535-1602). 35
32 When Spitsbergen was first discovered it was assumed that it was a part of Greenland. From
this the king of Denmark had concluded to call himself lord of Spitsbergen because Greenland was of
old a part of the dominion belonging to the crown of Norway that had been unified with the crown of
Denmark since the Union of Kalmar (1394). Samuel Muller Fz., Geschiedenis der Noordsche Compagnie
(Provinciaal Utrechtsch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen; Utrecht, 1874), p. 236.
33 Ibidem, pp. 236-84, and Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740 (Clarendon
Press; Oxford, 1989), pp. 94-95, 111-12, 146-49. In 1636 the value of the Baltic trade represented 41% of
the value of the total Dutch import from Europe. Simon Groenveld and Huib L. Ph. Leeuwenberg, De
bruid in de schuit: de consolodatie van de Republiek, 1609-1650 (Walburg Pers; Zutphen, 1985), pp. 160-61.
34 Both Vázquez’s Controversiarum illustrium usuque frequentium libri tres (1564) and the famous
lectures on the Indies (De Indis, 1539) by the Spanish Dominican friar Francisco de Vitoria (c.1492-1546)
were important sources for Grotius. For the theoretical background of Grotius’s argument in Mare
Liberum, see, amongst others, Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp. 169-79; idem, The Rights of War and
Peace, pp. 79-108, esp. pp. 90-94, 103-8; Mónica Brito Vieira, “Mare Liberum vs. Mare Clausum: Grotius,
Freitas, and Selden’s Debate on Dominion over the Seas”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 64, No. 3
(2003), pp. 361-77.
35 Born at Delft, Heuterus was a Catholic royalist and humanist. After escaping the massacre of
Gorcum (1572) where he had been the chapter’s estate agent, he fled to the Southern Netherlands. Later
he became a canon at Deventer, only to flee to the Southern Netherlands again after prince Maurits had
taken the town in 1592. He wrote several works on the history of the Netherlands that were published