Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor
Ferdinand I was Holy Roman Emperor from 1558 to 1564 and secured the settlement that ended forty years of religious war in Germany. Born in Alcalá de Henares in 1503, the younger brother of Charles V, he was raised in Spain while Charles was raised in the Netherlands, and was given the Austrian hereditary lands in 1521-22. He married Anna Jagiellon, and when her brother Louis II was killed at Mohács against the Ottomans in 1526, Ferdinand claimed Bohemia and Hungary. He obtained Bohemia peacefully and had to fight for Hungary against John Zápolya and the Turks, ending with a partition that left him a strip in the west while Suleiman held the centre and Transylvania became an Ottoman vassal. He was on the front line of the Ottoman advance for four decades, defending Vienna in 1529 and 1532 and paying tribute for years. He governed Germany for his brother from 1531 as King of the Romans, and he understood, as Charles never quite did, that the Lutheran princes could not be defeated permanently. He negotiated the Peace of Augsburg in September 1555, which recognised Lutheranism legally and established that each prince would determine the religion of his own territory, with subjects free to emigrate. It was not toleration, and it stopped the fighting for sixty-three years. He succeeded as emperor on Charles's abdication in 1558. He also centralised Austrian administration, founded a court chancellery and privy council, and supported the Jesuits in Vienna and Prague while pressing Rome unsuccessfully for clerical marriage and communion in both kinds. He died in 1564.
- Lived: 1503 CE – 1564 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
