Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor
Ferdinand II ruled as Holy Roman Emperor from 1619 to 1637 and pursued the Counter-Reformation with a rigidity that turned a Bohemian revolt into the Thirty Years' War. Born in Graz in 1578, he was educated by Jesuits at Ingolstadt and made a pilgrimage to Loreto in 1598, where he vowed to eliminate heresy from his lands. He then did exactly that in Inner Austria, expelling Protestant preachers and forcing conversion or emigration. He was elected King of Bohemia in 1617. His officials' disregard of the religious guarantees in Rudolf II's Letter of Majesty led Protestant nobles to throw two governors and a secretary from a window of Prague Castle in May 1618 — the Defenestration of Prague. The estates deposed him and elected Frederick of the Palatinate. He became emperor in 1619 and, with Spanish and Bavarian help, destroyed the Bohemian army at the White Mountain in November 1620. Twenty-seven leaders were executed in Prague, Protestant nobility were dispossessed on a vast scale, and Bohemia was re-Catholicised and reduced to a hereditary Habsburg province. The war then widened as Denmark and then Sweden intervened. He relied on Albrecht von Wallenstein, who raised armies on credit and financed them by systematic extraction from the territories they occupied. His Edict of Restitution in 1629, demanding the return of all church lands secularised since 1552, alarmed even Catholic princes and made a negotiated peace impossible. Gustavus Adolphus landed the following year. He had Wallenstein assassinated in 1634. The Peace of Prague in 1635 suspended the Edict. He died in 1637 with the war still running.
- Lived: 1578 CE – 1637 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
