Ferdinand I

/ferr"dn and'/; Ger. /ferdd"di nahnt'/

1. Spanish, Fernando I. ("Ferdinand the Great") died 1065, king of Castile 1033-65, king of Navarre and Leon 1037-65; emperor of Spain 1056-65.

2. 1503-64, king of Bohemia and Hungary 1526-64; emperor of the Holy Roman Empire 1558-64 (brother of Emperor Charles V).

3. (Maximilian Karl Leopold Maria) 1861-1948, king of Bulgaria 1908-18.

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I

born Jan. 2/12, 1751, Naples

died Jan. 4, 1825, Naples

King of the Two Sicilies (1816–25).

He became king of Naples in 1759, as Ferdinand IV, when his father ascended the Spanish throne as Charles III. A weak ruler, he was greatly influenced by his wife, Maria Carolina of Austria (1752–1814). He engaged Naples in the Austro-English coalition against the French Revolution in 1793. The French then invaded Naples, and he fled to Sicily (1798–99, 1806–16). He returned to Naples in 1816 after the fall of Napoleon, as king of the united Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. His despotic rule led to an uprising in 1820, after which he was forced to grant a constitution. With Austria's aid, he overthrew the constitutional government in 1821.

II

born March 10, 1503, Alcalá de Henares, Spain

died July 25, 1564, Vienna, Hapsburg domain

Holy Roman emperor (1558–64).

The brother of Emperor Charles V, he was Charles's deputy in the Habsburg German lands (1522–58). In 1526 he took possession of Bohemia without difficulty, but he faced rival claimants in Hungary and fought periodically against the Ottoman Empire, finally agreeing in 1562 to pay tribute to the Ottoman sultan for Austria's share of Hungary. Ferdinand helped Charles defeat the Protestant Schmalkaldic League, and he later compromised on the Protestant issue and signed the Peace of Augsburg (1555), ending the era of religious strife in Germany. Elected emperor after Charles's abdication, which separated the Habsburg domains into Spanish and Austrian parts, Ferdinand centralized the imperial administration.

Ferdinand I, engraving by Barthel Beham, 1531

Archiv fur Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin

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▪ Holy Roman emperor

born March 10, 1503, Alcalá de Henares, Spain

died July 25, 1564, Vienna, Habsburg domain [now in Austria]

 Holy Roman emperor (1558–64) and king of Bohemia and Hungary from 1526, who, with his Peace of Augsburg (Augsburg, Peace of) (1555), concluded the era of religious strife in Germany following the rise of Lutheranism by recognizing the right of territorial princes to determine the religion of their subjects. He also converted the elected crowns of Bohemia and Hungary into hereditary possessions of the house of Habsburg.

      The younger brother of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, Ferdinand was granted Austria, with the regency of both the Habsburg German lands and Württemberg. For more than three decades he was Charles's deputy in German affairs, representing him at imperial diets and serving as president of the Reichsregiment (imperial governmental council). Initially he followed Charles's policies almost unquestioningly. Hostile toward Protestantism, he bore some responsibility for the Lutheran secession from the Diet of Speyer (1529), and, after he had lost Württemberg to the Lutheran landgrave Philip the Magnanimous of Hesse (1534), he helped the emperor defeat the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in 1546–47. Aggrieved, however, at Charles's refusal to reinstate him in recaptured Württemberg and at the emperor's attempts to ensure the succession of his son Philip (the future Philip II of Spain) to the imperial crown, Ferdinand began to take a more independent stand. The imperial heir since 1531, he was not finally placated until Charles agreed in 1553 to exclude Philip from the German succession, which then passed to Ferdinand's son, the future Maximilian II. On the Protestant issue, Ferdinand, unlike Charles, eventually became convinced of the need for a compromise. In 1552 he negotiated the Treaty of Passau with the Lutheran elector Maurice of Saxony, who was at war with the emperor; and in 1555 he signed the Peace of Augsburg, which, with few interruptions, brought half a century of peace to Germany's warring religious factions.

      In foreign affairs Ferdinand was no less successful. In 1526, on the death of his brother-in-law, King Louis II of Bohemia and Hungary, Ferdinand claimed both domains. He took possession of Bohemia without difficulty but faced a rival claimant, János Zápolya (John), in Hungary. Each was elected by a rival faction, and Hungary remained divided among Ferdinand, Zápolya, and the Ottoman Empire. In 1538, by the Peace of Nagyvárad (German: Grosswardein), Ferdinand became Zápolya's successor, but he was unable to enforce the agreement in his lifetime. The Ottoman Empire almost continually threatened Europe during Ferdinand's reign. The Turks failed to take Vienna in 1529 but threatened Austria again in 1532 and 1541. After repeated and mostly futile pleas for assistance from the German princes, Ferdinand finally reestablished an uneasy peace in 1562, when he agreed to pay tribute to the Ottoman sultan for Austria's share of Hungary.

      Ferdinand took over Charles's imperial functions in 1555 and was elected emperor in 1558 after his brother's abdication. With his accession, the Habsburg domains became separated into more easily governable Austrian and Spanish parts, with Spain going to Philip and Germany to Ferdinand. The new emperor centralized his administration and, though only with limited success, sought to revive Roman Catholicism in his lands. His eldest son, Maximilian, succeeded him in 1564. Though always overshadowed by his brother Charles V, Ferdinand had become one of the most successful Habsburg rulers of the 16th century, increasing the hereditary possessions of the Austrian Habsburgs significantly and restoring peace to the empire after decades of religious warfare.

▪ grand duke of Tuscany

original name  Ferdinando De' Medici 

born July 30, 1549

died Feb. 7, 1609

      third grand duke (granduca) of Tuscany (1587–1609), who greatly increased the strength and prosperity of the country.

      The younger son of Cosimo I, Ferdinand had been made a cardinal at age 14 and was living in Rome when his brother Francis (Francesco) died without a male heir, and he inherited the grand ducal title (1587). He did not renounce his cardinalate until 1589, when he married Christine of Lorraine, daughter of Charles III of Lorraine, and a granddaughter of Catherine de Médicis through her mother, Claude de France. This marriage, moreover, symbolized his policy of rapprochement with France in order to counteract Spanish influence in Italy, where Tuscany's independence and prosperity was assured by his skill at playing one great power off against another. For all his ecclesiastical background, he was a far more capable exponent of Cosimo's policy than Francis had been.

      Secret loans from Ferdinand helped Henry of Navarre (Henry IV), even before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, in his war to make himself king of France as Henry IV; and the occupation of the Château d'If by Tuscan forces (1591) obstructed Spanish designs on Marseille during the same war. There was some dispute between Ferdinand and Henry before Ferdinand withdrew his garrison from the Château d'If (1598), but their friendship was sealed by Henry's marriage, in 1600, to Ferdinand's niece Maria (Marie de Médicis). To preserve good relations with the Austrian Habsburgs, on the other hand, Ferdinand's son Cosimo was married in 1608 to the archduchess Maria Magdalena, a first cousin of the emperor Rudolf II; and Tuscan forces helped the Austrians in their war against the Turks. The Knights of St. Stephen won notable victories over the Turks in the Ionian and Aegean seas (1605–09) and on the African coast (Bône, 1607).

      Ferdinand's wise administration, an increase of commercial activity, and the continuance of his predecessors' plans for draining the marshes and for developing Livorno and its port (where political exiles from abroad were encouraged to settle) raised the grand duchy to a new zenith of prosperity. In Rome, as a cardinal before becoming grand duke, Ferdinand had distinguished himself as a lover of the arts and as the builder of Villa Medici; and in Tuscany under his rule Giovanni da Bologna and Buontalenti remained active among artists and architects. Ferdinand also patronized Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Corsi, and other musicians of the Camerata de' Bardi, whose work marked the birth of opera in Florence.

▪ king of Aragon

byname  El de Antequera (“He of Antequera”)  or  El Infante de Antequera (“the Infante of Antequera”) 

born 1379?

died April 2, 1416, Igualada, Catalonia

      king of Aragon from 1412 to 1416, second son of John I of Castile and Eleanor, daughter of Peter IV of Aragon.

      Because his elder brother, Henry III, was an invalid, Ferdinand took the battlefield against the Muslims of Granada. When Henry III died in 1406, his son John II was an infant and the regency was divided between Henry's widow, Queen Catherine of Lancaster, and Ferdinand, who claimed positions on the royal council for his sons. In 1410 Ferdinand captured the Granadine fortress of Antequera, a feat that ensured his election to the throne of Aragon, vacant with the death of King Martin in 1412. Ferdinand was chosen by the Compromise of Caspe (1412), though the Catalans supported a rival. His election was due in part to the support of the Aragonese antipope Benedict XIII (Benedict (XIII)) and the efforts of St. Vincent Ferrer (Vincent Ferrer, Saint). Once elected, however, he ceased to support Benedict and so helped to end the Western Schism. In 1413 he accepted demands from Catalonia that limited royal power in a way that was not the case in Castile.

      On departing for Aragon he retained control of the Granadine frontier and of the positions held in Castile by his sons. His accession ended the long Catalan political domination of the Aragon state, which his nephew John II would bring into the orbit of Castile. Ferdinand's provision for his sons in Castile (where they were known as the “Infantes of Aragon”) added to the distinctiveness of the reign of the Castilian John II. He was succeeded on the throne by his son Alfonso V.

▪ king of Castile and Leon

byname  Ferdinand the Great , Spanish  Fernando el Magno 

born 1016/18

died December 27, 1065, León, Leon

      the first ruler of Castile to take the title of king. He also was crowned emperor of Leon.

      Ferdinand's father, Sancho III of Navarre, had acquired Castile and established hegemony over the Christian states. On his death in 1035 he left Navarre to his eldest son (García III (García III (or IV))) and Castile to his second son, Ferdinand, who had married Sancha, sister and heiress of Bermudo III of Leon. Ferdinand's Castilians defeated and killed Bermudo at Tamarón in 1037, and he had himself crowned emperor in the city of León in 1039. In 1054 his Castilian troops defeated and killed his elder brother, García III (García III (or IV)), at Atapuerca, and he added Navarre to his possessions. In 1062 he forced the Muslim ruler of Toledo to pay him tribute and imposed vassalage on Saragossa and Sevilla. He conquered Coimbra in central Portugal in 1064 and laid siege to Valencia, but he failed to capture it.

      He followed the custom of dividing his estates, leaving Castile to the eldest, Sancho II; Leon to the second, Alfonso VI; and Galicia to the third, García II. The first two dispossessed the third, and, on the murder of Sancho, Alfonso recovered the whole, becoming emperor of Castile and Leon.

▪ king of Naples

Italian  Ferrante, or Ferdinando  

born 1423, Valencia, Spain

died Jan. 25, 1494

      king of Naples from 1458.

      He was the illegitimate son of Alfonso V of Aragon, who, after establishing himself as king of Naples in 1442, had Ferdinand legitimized and recognized as his heir. Succeeding Alfonso in 1458, Ferdinand was soon faced with a baronial revolt in favour of René of Anjou, the pretender to the throne. He overcame the rebellion in 1464, but his rule was threatened by Ottoman expansionism, by the territorial ambitions of other Italian states, and by the rebelliousness of his own barons. Ferdinand, therefore, pursued an opportunist policy. In August 1480 the Turks seized the south Italian port of Otranto; Ferdinand, with the financial assistance of Florence, expelled them in 1481. Later he allied with Florence, and the two powers fought Venice in the War of Ferrara (1482–84).

      Ferdinand's attempts to break the barons' power resulted in another baronial revolt (1485–87), in which the barons attempted to replace the king with either René II of Lorraine or with Frederick of Aragon, Ferdinand's second son. Pope Innocent VIII also declared war on Ferdinand but agreed to a separate peace in 1486. Ferdinand finally suppressed the barons by a series of arrests, trials, confiscations, and executions.

▪ king of Portugal

byname  Ferdinand The Handsome, or The Fickle,  Portuguese  Fernando O Formoso, or O Inconstante 

born Oct. 31, 1345, Lisbon, Port.

died Oct. 22, 1383

      ninth king of Portugal (1367–83), whose reign was marked by three wars with Castile and by the growth of the Portuguese economy.

      The son of Peter I of Portugal, Ferdinand became a contender for the Castilian throne after the assassination (1369) of Peter the Cruel of Castile, thus initiating the first (1369–71) of the unsuccessful wars with Castile. After Ferdinand allied himself in 1372 with John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, there ensued a second war with Castile (1372–73), in which Castilian troops invaded Portugal, surrounded Lisbon (1373), and obliged Ferdinand to repudiate the English alliance and to accept the conditions of Henry II of Castile.

      The period of peace that followed was taken up with successive, and sometimes contradictory, diplomatic negotiations—with England, Castile, Aragon, and France—but the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of June 16, 1373, continued to form a basis of alliance between the two countries. The confirmation of the English treaties in 1380 gave rise to a third war with Castile (1381–82), which, like the earlier conflicts, was characterized by the lack of success of Portugal's military operations, in spite of forces sent from England under Edmund of Langley. Compelled once more to sign a peace treaty (August 1382) and to abandon his allies, Ferdinand obtained from the king of Castile the ships for repatriation of the English troops.

      Notwithstanding his preoccupation with war, Ferdinand promulgated laws that encouraged the development of agriculture, external trade, the merchant marine, and the army. Ferdinand's marriage in 1372 with Leonor Teles, a lady of somewhat doubtful morals, provoked discontent. The subsequent marriage on April 30, 1383, of his only legitimate child, Beatriz, with John I of Castile also caused unrest and, on Ferdinand's death, precipitated one of the most serious dynastic and national crises in Portuguese history, leading to the formation of a new dynasty, the Aviz, by John I of Portugal.

▪ king of Romania

born Aug. 24, 1865, Sigmaringen, Prussia [now in Germany]

died July 20, 1927, Bucharest, Rom.

      king of Romania from 1914 to 1927, who, though a Hohenzollern and a believer in German strength, joined the Allies in World War I.

      The son of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Ferdinand was adopted as crown prince of Romania in 1889 by his uncle, King Carol I, whose only child had died. In 1893 he married Lady Marie, daughter of the Duke of Edinburgh and granddaughter of Queen Victoria and of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. Though retiring in nature and occasionally vacillating, Ferdinand showed considerable interest in Romanian military affairs and commanded the army during the Second Balkan War (1913). When his uncle died he succeeded to the Romanian throne in October 1914. Early in World War I he waited on events before finally casting his lot with the Allied powers (August 1916). With the occupation of Bucharest by the Germans late in 1916, he moved his beleaguered government to Iași. In April 1917 he averted a potentially revolutionary situation when he promised land reform and the right to vote to an assemblage of Romanian peasant troops, but he failed to arrive at definitive solutions for either the agrarian problem or the shortcomings of democracy in the postwar years.

      In March 1918 Romania was forced to surrender to the Central powers but rejoined the Allies in November 1918 and later incorporated Transylvania, Bukovina, part of the Banat, and Bessarabia into a Greater Romanian state. Ferdinand thus found his postwar kingdom doubled in size, and in October 1922 he was solemnly crowned king of all Romanians at Alba Iulia. In 1920 he engineered the installation of General Alexandru Averescu as premier; it was Averescu's government that in 1921 finally enacted a measure of the king's long-promised land reform. In 1925 Ferdinand forced his son, the playboy crown prince Carol, to renounce his rights to the throne and, later, in his will secured the succession of his young grandson, Prince Michael.

▪ king of the Two Sicilies

born Jan. 2/12, 1751, Naples

died Jan. 4, 1825, Naples

      king of the Two Sicilies (1816–25) who earlier (1759–1806), as Ferdinand IV of Naples, led his kingdom in its fight against the French Revolution and its liberal ideas. A relatively weak and somewhat inept ruler, he was greatly influenced by his wife, Maria Carolina of Austria, who furthered the policy of her favourite adviser, the Englishman Sir John Acton.

      Ferdinand became king of Naples as a boy when his father ascended the Spanish throne (1759) as Charles III. A regency ruled during Ferdinand's minority and continued the liberal reforms of the previous king. In 1767 Ferdinand reached his majority, and his marriage in 1768 to Maria Carolina signalled a reversal of this policy. The birth of a male heir gave Maria Carolina the right, according to the marriage contract, to enter the council of state (1777). She brought about the downfall of the former regent Bernardo Tanucci and engaged Naples in the Austro-English coalition against the French Revolution in 1793.

      Ferdinand, encouraged by the arrival of the British fleet of Admiral Horatio Nelson, attacked the French-supported Roman republic in 1798. On December 21 of that year, however, the French invaded Naples, declaring it the Parthenopean Republic, and Ferdinand fled to Sicily. The Republic was overthrown in June 1799, and Ferdinand returned to Naples, where he put to death the Republic's supporters, violating the terms of their surrender.

      In 1806 Napoleon's army captured Naples, forcing Ferdinand's flight to Sicily, where, yielding to British pressure to mitigate his absolutist rule, he removed Maria Carolina from the court, appointed his son Francis as regent, and granted the Sicilians a constitution. With the fall of Napoleon, he returned to Naples as Ferdinand I of the united kingdom of the Two Sicilies (December 1816). His renewal of absolute rule led to the constitutionalist uprising of 1820, which forced Ferdinand to grant a constitution. Having ceded power again to his son Francis, Ferdinand, under the pretext of protecting the new constitution, obtained his parliament's permission to attend the Congress of Laibach (Laibach, Congress of) early in 1821. Once there, he won the aid of Austria, which overthrew Naples' constitutional government in March. The subsequent reprisals against the constitutionalists were his last important official acts before his sudden death.

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