Everything about Emperor Ferdinand I totally explained
Ferdinand I (
Alcala de Henares (near
Madrid),
Kingdom of Castile (now
Spain),
10 March 1503 –
Prague,
Bohemia (now
Czech Republic),
25 July 1564) was an
Austrian monarch from the House of
Habsburg.
He was
Archduke of
Austria from 1521-1564. After the death of
Louis II, Ferdinand ruled as King of
Bohemia and
Hungary (1526–1564). He succeeded his brother
Charles V as
Holy Roman Emperor (de facto in 1556, de jure in 1558), reigning until his death. His motto was
Fiat justitia et pereat mundus ("Let justice be done, though the world perish").
Biography
Early years
Ferdinand was born in
Alcala de Henares, 40 km from
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 Emperor
Maximilian I on the 10 March 1503. He shared his birthday with his maternal grandfather Ferdinand, King of Spain.
Ferdinand was the younger brother of 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 wasn't 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 II (1527–1576).
Hungary and the Ottomans
After Sultan
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.
Nicolaus Olahus, secretary of Louis, attached himself to the party of King Ferdinand, but retained his position with the queen-
dowager Mary of Habsburg. 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. After defeat by Ferdinand at the
Battle of Tokaj in 1527, Zápolya gained 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 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 a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.
In 1538, by the
Treaty of Nagyvárad, Ferdinand became Zápolya's successor. He was unable to enforce this agreement during his lifetime because
John II Sigismund Zápolya, infant son of John Zápolya and Isabella Jagiełło, was elected King of Hungary in 1540. Zápolya was initially supported by King
Sigismund of
Poland, 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 Augustus married
Elisabeth of Austria, 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
Breslau for
Silesia. Opposition from the nobles in those realms forced him to concede the independence of these institutions from supervision by the Austrian government in
Vienna in 1559.
In 1547 the
Bohemian Estates rebelled against Ferdinand after he'd ordered the Bohemian army to move against the German
Protestants. After suppressing Prague with the help of his brother Charles V'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 response 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. Finally, in
1561 Ferdinand revived the
Archdiocese of Prague, which had been previously liquidated due to the success of the Protestants.
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;
Spanish:
Fernando I.
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:
Further Information
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