Grotiana in Amsterdam

One more fun post from Amsterdam.  The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam featured one of the book chests reputed to have been the chest that Grotius used to make his escape from prison in Loevenstein Castle.

It is not that large, a fact reinforcing the extreme discomfort and courage that Grotius must have mustered to attempt this.  One of the Peace Palace librarians mentioned to me that most Dutch probably will know Grotius only for this episode, and not for his intellectual achievements in law, letters, or theology.  Grotius became a sort of folk hero, and the escape is memorialized in prints such as this:

Public domain: Wikipedia commons

One last point I wanted to add to this journal was the Oost-Indisch Huis, the former headquarters of the VOC (Grotius's former employer, the Dutch East India Company) and, for some time, Grotius's workplace.

Now it is an academic building for the University of Amsterdam.