Emeric Cruce and a League of Nations
During the early years of the Thirty Years War, writes Wayland Young, a monk of Paris published a book in which he outlined a peaceful future League of Nations.
In the long development of European thought on international organization, we should look back more carefully to Eméric Crucé than to any of his predecessors, and to most of his successors. His field of vision distinctively exceeded Dante’s, who wanted nothing more interesting than an Imperial hegemony; Campanella’s, who wanted first a Spanish and then a French one; and even Sully’s, who later pillaged Crucé’s own work to support the case for a ‘Grand Design’ which was just another name for the same French hegemony.
Not being content with the imposed hegemony of one power, Crucé still did not fall back upon the ‘jungle-as-before’ concepts of Dubois, let alone the fag-end of the crusading tradition surviving in his day with Giovanni Botero, who argued that annexation of territory as a result of just war was permissible so long as ‘we have the Turks at our gates and on our flank; could there be a juster or more honourable argument for war?’ Above all, he got beyond Erasmus, who wanted, indeed, kingdoms of moderate power united in a League, but only in a Christian League.
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