Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor

Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor (10 March 1503 – 25 July 1564) was Holy Roman Emperor from 1556 (not formally until 1558) till his death in 1564.

Biography

Early years

Ferdinand was born in Madrid, the son of Juana the Mad, Queen of Castile (1479–1555), and Philip I the Handsome, King of Castile (1478–1506), who was heir to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg.

Ferdinand was the younger brother of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who entrusted him with the government of the Habsburg hereditary lands (roughly modern-day Austria and Slovenia). In 1531 Ferdinand was elected King of the Romans, making him Charles's designated heir as emperor. He deputised as ruler during his brother's many absences from imperial lands.

After Charles's abdication as emperor in 1556, which was not formal until 1558, Ferdinand assumed the title of Holy Roman Emperor, Charles having agreed to exclude his own son Philip from the German succession, which instead passed to Ferdinand's eldest son Maximilian (1527–1576).

Hungary and the Ottomans

After Suleiman the Magnificent defeated Ferdinand's brother-in-law Louis II, King of Bohemia and of Hungary, at the battle of Mohács on 29 August 1526, Ferdinand was elected King of Bohemia in his place. The throne of Hungary became the subject of a dynastic dispute between Ferdinand and John Zápolya, voivode of Transylvania. Each was supported by different factions of the nobility in the Hungarian kingdom; Ferdinand also had the support of Charles V, and Zápolya, after defeat by Ferdinand at the Battle of Tokaj in 1527, the support of Suleiman. Ferdinand was able to win control only of western Hungary because Zápolya clung to the east and the Ottomans to the conquered south. Zápolya's widow, Isabella Jagiełło, ceded Royal Hungary and Transylvania to Ferdinand in the Treaty of Weissenburg of 1551. In 1554 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq was sent to Istanbul by Ferdinand to discuss a border treaty over disputed land with the Sultan, Suleiman.

The most dangerous moment of Ferdinand's career came in 1529 when he took refuge in Bohemia from a massive but ultimately unsuccessful assault on his capital by Suleiman and the Ottoman armies at the Siege of Vienna. A further Ottoman attack on Vienna was repelled in 1533. In that year Ferdinand signed a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire, splitting the Kingdom of Hungary into a Habsburg sector in the west and John Zápolya's domain in the east, the latter effectively now a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.

In 1538, by the Treaty of Nagyvárad, Ferdinand became Zápolya's successor, but he was unable to enforce this agreement during his lifetime because in 1540 John II Sigismund Zápolya, infant son of John Zápolya and Isabella Jagiełło, was elected the new king of Hungary. Zápolya was initially supported by King Sigismund of Poland and Lithuania, his mother's father, but in 1543 a treaty was signed between the Habsburgs and the Polish ruler as a result of which Poland became neutral in the conflict, prince Sigismund marrying Elisabeth von Habsburg, Ferdinand's daughter.

Government

The western rump of Hungary over which Ferdinand retained dominion became known as Royal Hungary. As the ruler of Austria, Bohemia and Royal Hungary, Ferdinand adopted a policy of centralization and, in common with other monarchs of the time, the construction of an absolute monarchy. In 1527 he published a constitution for his hereditary domains (Hofstaatsordnung) and established Austrian-style institutions in Pressburg for Hungary, in Prague for Bohemia, and in Wrocław (Breslau) for Silesia. Opposition from the nobles in those realms forced him in 1559 to concede the independence of these institutions from supervision by the Austrian government in Vienna.

In 1547 the Bohemian Estates rebelled against Ferdinand when he ordered the Bohemian army against the German Protestants. After suppressing Prague with the help of his brother's Spanish forces, he retaliated by limiting the privileges of Bohemian cities and inserting a new bureaucracy of royal officials to control urban authorities. Ferdinand was a supporter of the Counter-Reformation and helped lead the Catholic fight-back against what he saw as the heretical tide of Protestantism. For example, in 1551 he invited the Jesuits to Vienna and in 1556 to Prague, and in 1561 he revived the Archdiocese of Prague.

Ferdinand died in Vienna and is buried in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague.

Name in other languages

German, Czech, Slovak, Croatian: Ferdinand I.; Hungarian: I. Ferdinánd

Marriage and children

On 25 May 1521 in Linz, Austria, Ferdinand married Anna of Bohemia and Hungary (1503–1547), daughter of Vladislaus II of Bohemia and Hungary and his wife Anne de Foix. They had fifteen children:

• Elisabeth of Austria (July 9, 1526 - June 15, 1545). In 1543 she was married to king Sigismund II Augustus of Poland and Lithuania.
• Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor (July 31, 1527 - October 12, 1576).
• Anna of Austria (July 7, 1528 - October 16/October 17, 1590). Married Albert V, Duke of Bavaria.
• Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria (June 14, 1529 - January 24, 1595).
• Maria of Habsburg, Archduchess of Austria (May 15, 1531–December 11, 1581). Consort of Wilhelm, Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg.
• Magdalena of Austria (August 14, 1532 - September 10, 1590). A nun.
• Catharine of Austria (September 15, 1533 - February 28, 1572). In 1553 she was married to king Sigismund II Augustus of Poland and Lithuania.
• Eleonora of Austria (November 2, 1534 - August 5, 1594). Married William I, Duke of Mantua.
• Margaret of Austria (February 16, 1536 - March 12, 1567). A nun.
• Johann of Austria (April 10, 1538 - March 20, 1539).
• Barbara of Austria (April 30, 1539 - September 19, 1572). Married Alfonso II d'Este.
• Charles II, Archduke of Austria (June 3, 1540 - July 10, 1590), father of Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor.
• Ursula of Austria (July 24, 1541 - April 30, 1543).
• Helen of Austria (January 7, 1543 - March 5, 1574). A nun.
• Johanna of Austria (January 24, 1547 - April 10, 1578). Married Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Ancestors

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