chapter four

Putting Nature and

Nations Asunder

I

t was traditionally supposed that Alexander the Great traveled with

a copy of Homer’s Iliad constantly to hand, and that he even slept with it

under his pillow. A similar story arose of the energetic Swedish King Gusta-

vus Adolphus, the most fearsome commander of the Th irty Years War in

Eu rope (1618– 48). His reputed choice of reading material was a ponderous

legal tome entitled On the Law of War and Peace (1625), written by Hugo

Grotius. Of the two generals, Alexander certainly had the advantage from

the literary standpoint. Grotius’s work was a densely learned treatise, heav-

ily weighed down with an interminable mass of humanist learning. So bulky

was it that, if Gustavus had had it on his person at the Battle of Lutzen in

1632, it might easily have stopped the bullets that killed him. But the book

performed heroic ser vice of another sort. It became the leading text of inter-

national law for the next century and more.

New Ways of War and Statecraft

In de pen dent states had existed de facto in Eu rope since the demise of the

Roman Empire. Only in the thirteenth century, however, with the recovery

of Aristotle’s Politics, did the in de pen dence of states begin to be accepted as

a matter of high principle rather than as a sad misfortune and index of hu-

man degeneracy. With the growth and consolidation of the major Eu ro pe an

states from the late Middle Ages onward, this sentiment grew steadily.