Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor

• 1. Introduction

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  Ferdinand I chose as his motto a sentence that sounds almost reckless: Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus, "Let justice be done, though the world perish". It is a strange creed for a man whose whole career was an exercise in flexibility, moderation, and tolerance. Born on the 10th of March 1503 in Alcala de Henares, he was the second son of Philip I of Castile and Joanna of Castile. He grew up in Spain and did not learn German until he was a young adult. Yet he would become Holy Roman Emperor, and the last King of Germany ever crowned in Aachen. How does a Spanish-raised younger brother end up ruling Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia, and brokering a religious peace between Catholics and Lutherans? And why, given his many lands, did he never reach for the universal monarchy that tempted his family? The answers run through bankers, sultans, a poisoned succession in Hungary, and a single article he slipped into a treaty at the last minute on his own authority.

• 2. The Favorite Grandson

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  His maternal grandmother, Isabella I of Castile, ordered that among the 24 servants attending the newborn Ferdinand there should be four musicians. Music stayed with him for life. After Isabella died in 1505, King Ferdinand II of Aragon set up the young prince with a household of 62 servants and his own music chapel. The boy shared a great deal with that grandfather. They had the same name, the same birthday of the 10th of March, and even their mothers were both named after one another, Juana Enriquez and Joanna of Castile. Unsurprisingly, the younger Ferdinand became the old king's favorite grandchild. When his father Philip died in 1506, Ferdinand II of Aragon assumed guardianship of the boy. Raised in the royal household, he studied literature, the sciences, and languages, and grew into a patron of the arts and of scholars at his court. In the summer of 1518 his life pivoted outward. His elder brother Charles had landed in Castile the previous autumn as the newly appointed King Charles I, and Ferdinand was sent to Flanders. He returned in command of his brother's fleet, but was blown off course and spent four days in Kinsale in Ireland before reaching his destination.

• 3. Brother's Deputy

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  In 1519 the death of their grandfather Maximilian I lifted the 19-year-old Charles to the title of Holy Roman Emperor. With that, Ferdinand was handed the government of the Austrian hereditary lands, roughly modern-day Austria and Slovenia. He held the title Archduke of Austria from 1521 to 1564. He had married Anna of Bohemia and Hungary on the 26th of May 1521 in Linz, a daughter of Vladislaus II. The couple would have fifteen children, all but two reaching adulthood. Ruling in his brother's name, Ferdinand still managed to strengthen his own realm. He adopted German language and culture later in life, and grew close to the German territorial princes. He served as Charles's deputy in the empire during the emperor's many absences. In 1531 he was elected King of the Romans, which made him Charles's designated heir. The historian Brendan Simms explains the division of labor bluntly. Charles was busy fighting the Ottomans, France, and German Protestants across Hungary, Italy, the Mediterranean, and Germany. So the defense of central Europe was delegated to Ferdinand, who already carried many responsibilities in managing the empire.

• 4. The Hungarian Gamble

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  The Battle of Mohacs on the 29th of August 1526 killed Ferdinand's brother-in-law Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia against the Ottomans. Ferdinand declared himself a candidate in the royal elections at once. Both kingdoms were elective monarchies, where the parliaments chose the king. On the 24th of October 1526 the Bohemian Diet, swayed by chancellor Adam of Hradce, elected him king on conditions: confirm the estates' privileges and move the Habsburg court to Prague. They refused, however, to recognise him as hereditary ruler. Hungary split. On the 10th of November 1526 the lesser nobility proclaimed John Zapolya, Voivode of Transylvania, king at Szekesfehervar. On the 17th of December 1526 a rump diet of magnates and Catholic clergy at Pozsony elected Ferdinand. He was crowned in the Szekesfehervar Basilica on the 3rd of November 1527. The Croatian nobles unanimously accepted him at the 1527 election in Cetin, confirming the succession for him and his heirs. In return he promised to respect Croatian rights, laws, and customs, and to defend Croatia from Ottoman invasion. As he told the Austrian Landtag at Linz in 1530, the Turks could not be resisted "unless the Kingdom of Hungary is in the hands of an Archduke of Austria or another German prince".

• 5. The Sultan At The Gates

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  Ferdinand's annual revenues stretched only far enough to hire 5,000 mercenaries for two months. The Austrian lands were in miserable economic and financial conditions, and the so-called Turk Tax, the Turkensteuer, never raised enough. So he leaned on his brother and borrowed from bankers like the Fugger family. He won battles he could not afford. He defeated Zapolya at the Battle of Tarcal in September 1527 and again at the Battle of Szina in March 1528. Zapolya fled and appealed to Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The reply came in 1529 as the most dangerous moment of Ferdinand's career, the Siege of Vienna, which drove him into refuge in Bohemia. A further Ottoman invasion was repelled in 1532 at the Siege of Guns. The Treaty of Constantinople of 1533 then split Hungary, with the Habsburg kingdom in the west and Zapolya's Eastern Hungarian Kingdom as an Ottoman vassal. Pressure from Suleiman bent Ferdinand's religious policy too. He had been unwilling to grant the peace Protestants demanded, but as Suleiman's army drew nearer he yielded. On the 23rd of July 1532 the Nuremberg Religious Peace was concluded, giving those who had joined the Reformation religious liberty until a council should meet.

• 6. A Murder And A Cardinal

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  The childless Zapolya agreed in the Treaty of Nagyvarad of 1538 to name Ferdinand his successor. Then in 1540, just before dying, Zapolya had a son, John Sigismund Zapolya, whom the diet promptly elected king. Ferdinand invaded, the regent Frater George Martinuzzi called on the Ottomans, and at the Siege of Buda in 1541 Suleiman drove Ferdinand from central Hungary and forced him to pay tribute for his western lands. The boy king's grandfather, Sigismund I the Old of Poland, backed him until 1543, when Poland turned neutral and his son Sigismund II Augustus married Ferdinand's daughter Elisabeth. Martinuzzi, the real power in the east, switched sides in 1549 to support Ferdinand. The Treaty of Weissenburg of 1551 had Isabella Jagiellon abdicate on her son's behalf and hand over the Holy Crown of Hungary. But Martinuzzi kept courting the Ottomans, and Ferdinand's general Castaldo, suspecting treason, had him killed with the emperor's approval. Martinuzzi was by then an archbishop and cardinal, so the act was shocking, and Pope Julius III excommunicated both Castaldo and Ferdinand. Ferdinand answered with a charge of treason in 87 articles, supported by 116 witnesses. The Pope exonerated him and lifted the excommunications in 1555.

• 7. Whose Realm His Religion

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  Charles V ordered a general Diet at Augsburg and stayed away, delegating to Ferdinand the authority to "act and settle" disputes of territory, religion, and local power. The conference opened on the 5th of February, and on the 25th of September three principles were promulgated. The first, cuius regio, eius religio, "Whose realm, his religion", made the prince's faith the faith of the state, while dissenters were allowed to leave, an innovative idea in the sixteenth century. The second, the reservatum ecclesiasticum, covered ecclesiastical states, where a prelate who changed religion was expected to resign rather than convert his subjects. The third was the Declaratio Ferdinandei, exempting some knights and cities from religious uniformity where the reformed faith had been practised since the mid-1520s. Ferdinand inserted it at the last minute, on his own authority, and it was never debated in plenary session. The settlement had deep flaws. He had rushed the ecclesiastical reservation through, so its wording covered few real scenarios. Worse, the peace ignored the growing diversity of faith. Anabaptists like the Frisian Menno Simons, the followers of John Calvin, and the followers of Huldrych Zwingli were all excluded, their beliefs left heretical under the agreement.

• 8. The Emperor In Vienna

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  In 1556, leaning on the shoulder of the 24-year-old William the Silent, Charles V gave away his lands and offices amid great pomp. Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, Milan, and the American possessions went to his son Philip. Ferdinand became monarch in his own right in Austria and succeeded as Holy Roman Emperor, a course guaranteed since his election as King of the Romans on the 5th of January 1531. The Imperial Diet did not accept the succession until the 3rd of May 1558, and the Pope withheld recognition until 1559. Some historians call Ferdinand the closest the empire ever came to a Protestant emperor, noting he reportedly refused last rites on his deathbed, though he stayed nominally Catholic. Unlike Maximilian I and Charles V, he was not a nomadic ruler. He moved his residence to Vienna in 1533, and after the siege of 1529 worked to make the city an impregnable fortress; after 1558 it became the imperial capital. His government took institutional shape there. The Hofkriegsrat, the Aulic War Council, was established in 1556 to coordinate military affairs across the Habsburg lands, joined by the Hofkammer finance chamber and a merged chancellery from 1559. He revived the Archdiocese of Prague in 1561, and in December 1562 had his eldest son Maximilian elected King of the Romans, securing a succession that would pass unchallenged.

  The Kingdom of Hungary shrank by around 70 percent during the Ottoman wars, yet the depleted Royal Hungary remained Ferdinand's largest single source of revenue, more important to the Habsburgs than Austria or Bohemia even at the close of the sixteenth century. Bohemia, which provided him half his revenue, he held tightly after crushing the estates' revolt of 1547, limiting urban privileges, inserting royal officials, and favouring the Jesuits, whom he invited to Vienna in 1551 and Prague in 1556. The historian Fichtner judges him a mediocre military commander but an energetic and imaginative administrator. His framework, a court council, privy council, central treasury, and a body for military affairs bound by a common chancery, endured into the 18th century. The structure he reintroduced from his grandfather Maximilian I would last until the reform of Maria Theresa. He embellished Vienna and Prague, reorganised the University of Vienna, and drew architects and scholars from Italy and the Low Countries, even promoting the study of Oriental languages. Ferdinand died in Vienna in 1564 and was buried in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. His memory still circulates in metal: he is the main motif of the Austrian silver 20 euro Renaissance coin issued on the 12th of June 2002, his portrait on the reverse, the Swiss Gate of the Hofburg Palace on the obverse.