Ferdinand II of Habsburg

Ferdinand II of Habsburg (9 July 1578 in Graz - 15 February 1637 in Vienna), Archduke of Austria, Duke of Styria, Carinthia and Carniola (1590-1637), King of Bohemia (1617-1618) (1620-1637), King of Hungary and Croatia (1618-1637) and Holy Roman Emperor (1619-1637).

He was a devotee of the Catholic Church. The recognition of him as King of Bohemia and the suppression of Protestantism in his territories precipitated the events that led to the Thirty Years' War. His reign was marked by military and religious affairs.

Biography

Early Years

He was born in Graz the son of Duke Charles II of Styria, Archduke of Austria (1540-1590), and Maria Anna of Bavaria (1551-1608), and grandson of Ferdinand I of the Holy Roman Empire. Fernando received a strict Jesuit education culminating in his years at the University of Ingolstadt. After completing his studies in 1595, he acceded to his hereditary lands (where his older cousin Archduke Maximilian III of Austria had acted as regent between 1593 and 1595) and made a pilgrimage to Loreto and Rome. Soon after, he began to suppress the practice of non-Catholic religions within his territory.

Reign

In 1617, Ferdinand was elected King of Bohemia by the Diet of Bohemia. He also secured the support of the Spanish Habsburgs in his claim to the throne vacated by Emperor Matthias of Habsburg, who died childless, by granting them control of Alsace and imperial fiefdoms in Italy with the Treaty of Oñate.

Fernando's ultra-Catholicism led to the infringement of the religious freedom of non-Catholics. Among other things, the king did not respect the religious freedoms contemplated in the Letter of Majesty, signed by the previous emperor, Rudolf II, to end religious conflicts, which had guaranteed freedom of worship to the nobles and the inhabitants of the cities. Additionally, Ferdinand was an absolutist monarch and infringed what for the nobles were secular rights. Given the relatively large number of Protestants in the kingdom, including some of the noble classes, the new king soon became unpopular and some dissidents participated in the so-called Bohemian Revolt. On May 22, 1618 two (Catholic) royal officials in Prague were thrown out of a castle window by Bohemian Protestants. Although they were not injured (they fell on a wagon full of dung), the offense against royal dignity led to hardening of attitudes and an outright rebellion. The nobility rebelled against Ferdinand and replaced him with Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate, known as the "Winter King".

The situation worsened when Ferdinand II was crowned in 1618 as Hungarian king and also tried to eradicate Protestantism in the territories of the Kingdom of Hungary. This State was divided into three parts, a western one under the control of the Habsburgs, a central one in the power of the Ottoman Turks and an independent eastern one in the figure of the Principality of Transylvania governed by the Hungarian nobility. Protestantism was extremely popular in Transylvania, so while Rudolf II's measures did not affect them directly, they were aggrieved by Protestant Hungarians living in the Habsburg king's domain. Using the religious war as an excuse, the Hungarian Prince Gabriel Bethlen of Transylvania went to direct war with Ferdinand II, joining the conflicts that had broken out in other parts of Bohemia. It was in this year that the Thirty Years' War began.

Holy Roman Emperor

Emperor Matthias died in Vienna in March 1619. As previously agreed, Ferdinand succeeded to the throne. Supported by the Catholic League, also known as the Holy German League, which included the rulers of Poland, Spain, and Bavaria, Ferdinand sought to reclaim his possessions in Bohemia and put down the Protestant rebellion, gathered in the League of the Union. Evangelical. On November 8, 1620, Catholic forces clashed with those of the Protestant Frederick, who had been elected King of Bohemia in 1618, at the Battle of White Mountain. After only two hours of fighting the Catholics emerged victorious. The now deposed Frederick fled to the Netherlands, and Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria, leader of the Catholic League, proceeded to seize and confiscate his lands in the Palatinate (right bank of the Rhine) to divide up with Spain (which kept the lands on the left bank of the Rhine). Ferdinand strengthened the Bohemian Catholic Church, reduced the authority of the Diet, and forcibly converted Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian Protestants.

In 1625, despite receiving subsidies from Spain and the Pope, Ferdinand found himself in financial trouble and looking for ways to finance his own army. His solution was to commission the Bohemian soldier Albrecht von Wallenstein to create and lead an imperial army. Wallenstein accepted the proposal with the only condition that the direction (and possession) of the funds of the army were his alone, as well as the right to distribute the loot and ransoms that were taken in the course of military operations. He soon recruited at least 30,000 men (he would later command 100,000), and fighting alongside the Catholic League army, Wallenstein defeated Protestant forces in Silesia, Anhalt, and in Denmark, whose Lutheran king Christian IV of Denmark had to sign the Peace of Lübeck.

As his forces scored important battlefield victories against the Protestants, Ferdinand crowned his religious policies by issuing the Edict of Restitution (1629), designed to restore all ecclesiastical properties that had They have been secularized since the Peace of Passau in 1552. This pro-Catholic policy was largely the reason why the Protestant king of Sweden, Gustav II Adolf of Sweden, allied with the French, entered to take part in the war against Ferdinand.

Despite Wallenstein's military success, many of Ferdinand's advisers considered him a real political risk due to his growing influence and increasing number of estates and titles, as well as the methods he used to raise funds for his army. Ferdinand responded by sacking Wallenstein in 1630. With the loss of his commander, he was forced to entrust military policy again to the Catholic League led by the Earl of Tilly, which was unable to stop the Swedish advance, fell at the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631) and died in 1632. At this Ferdinand again called Wallenstein out of retirement.

In the spring of 1632, Wallenstein raised a new army within weeks and drove the Protestant army out of Bohemia. In November the great Battle of Lützen took place, in which the Catholics were defeated, but King Gustavus Adolphus was killed. Wallenstein retired to winter quarters in Bohemia. Although he had lost strategically and been expelled from Saxony, the Protestants had suffered many more casualties.

The campaign of 1633 did not help to decide anything in the course of the war, in part because Wallenstein was negotiating with the enemy, thinking that the army would be loyal to him, instead of Ferdinand, if he changed sides. At the beginning of 1634 he was openly accused of treason and was assassinated, probably on Ferdinand's orders.

Despite the loss of Wallenstein, Imperial forces took Regensburg and won the Battle of Nördlingen (1634). The Swedish force was greatly weakened, but France entered the war on the Protestant side fearing Habsburg domination in Europe. Although France was Catholic, she feared both the Germans and the Spanish (both ruled by the House of Habsburg), so Cardinal Richelieu convinced King Louis XIII to ally with the Dutch and Swedes.

The French were not satisfied with the terms signed in the Peace of Prague of 1635, Ferdinand's last important act in which he obtained the support of the Protestant Electorate of Saxony, in exchange for ceding Lower and Upper Lusatia. For this reason, despite the fact that the treaty was signed, peace did not materialize. On Ferdinand's death in 1637, his son Ferdinand III of Habsburg inherited an empire at war. He was buried in the Graz Mausoleum.

Married couples and children

Fernando II of Habsburg.

He married his niece María Ana de Baviera (1574-1616), daughter of Duke Guillermo V of Baviera (Ferdinand's paternal uncle) and Renata de Lorraine (1544-1602), the latter's daughter. of Cristina of Denmark (maternal niece of the emperors Carlos V and Fernando I). This union had seven children:

• Cristina de Habsburg (1601-1601), Archduke of Austria.
• Carlos de Habsburg (1603-1603), Archduke of Austria.
• Juan Carlos de Habsburg (1 November 1605 - 28 December 1619), Archduke of Austria.
• Fernando de Habsburg (Graz, 13 July 1608 - Vienna, 2 April 1657), Archduke of Austria and Emperor.
• María Ana de Habsburg (13 January 1610 - 25 September 1665), Archduke of Austria. Married to her motherly uncle Maximiliano I, Duke and elector of Bavaria.
• Cecilia Renata de Habsburg (16 July 1611 - 24 March 1644), Archduchess of Austria. Married with Vladislao IV Vasa, King of Poland.
• Leopoldo Guillermo de Habsburg (1614-1662). Archduke of Austria.

After being widowed, he married a second time in 1622 with Eleanor Gonzaga (1598-1655), daughter of Duke Vincenzo I of Mantua and Eleanor de' Medici of Tuscany, in Innsbruck.

Ancestors

Succession

Predecessor: Matías	Elect Emperor of the Holy Roman German Empire 1619 - 1637	Successor: Fernando III
Predecessor: Matías I	King of Bohemia 1617 - 1619 1620 - 1637	Successor: Federico del Palatinado (rivalry 1619 - 1620) ---- Fernando III
Predecessor: Matías II	King of Hungary and Croatia 1618 - 1637	Successor: Fernando III
Predecessor: Matías	Archduke of Austria 1619 - 1637	Successor: Fernando IV(Emperador Fernando III)
Predecessor: Carlos II	Duke of Styria, Carniola and Carinthia (Austria Interior) 1590 - 1637	Successor: Fernando IV(Emperador Fernando III)
Predecessor: Matías	Count of Tyrol and Archduke in Austria Previous 1619-1623 with Leopoldo V (1619 - 1623) as governor	Successor: Leopoldo V