10 ECU - Beatrix Grotius

This piece was issued to mark the 350th anniversary of Hugo Grotius's De Jure Belli ac Pacis, the 1625 treatise that effectively founded the modern discipline of international law. Grotius wrote it in exile in Paris, having escaped from Loevestein Castle in 1621 concealed, famously, in a chest of books. The ECU series issued by the Dutch mint in this period was never legal tender in the conventional sense — these were collector pieces tied to the pre-euro European Currency Unit, a basket currency that ceased to exist when the euro launched in 1999.