Ferdinand II

Habsburg and Wittelsbach blood combined in Ferdinand II, born at Graz in 1578 to Archduke Charles II of Inner Austria and Maria Anna of Bavaria; educated by the Jesuits at the Bavarian university of Ingolstadt, he emerged as the most determined champion of Catholic restoration his dynasty produced. As ruler of Inner Austria from the 1590s he suppressed Protestantism in Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, a program he later sought to extend across the Habsburg lands.

Designated heir to his childless cousin Matthias, Ferdinand was crowned King of Bohemia in 1617 and of Hungary in 1618. The Bohemian estates, fearing for the religious liberties guaranteed by the Letter of Majesty, rose against him; the Defenestration of Prague in May 1618 opened the revolt that grew into the Thirty Years' War. In 1619 the rebels declared Ferdinand deposed and elected the Calvinist Frederick V of the Palatinate, a Wittelsbach of the rival branch, as their king, even as Ferdinand was elected Holy Roman Emperor at Frankfurt. With the support of his Wittelsbach cousin and former schoolmate Maximilian I of Bavaria and of Habsburg Spain, his forces crushed the Bohemians at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. There followed executions of rebel leaders, sweeping confiscations, forced re-Catholicization, and a new Bohemian constitution in 1627 that made the crown hereditary in the Habsburg line.

The war widened as Danish, then Swedish, and ultimately French intervention prolonged the fighting. At the height of his power Ferdinand issued the Edict of Restitution in 1629, demanding the return of church lands secularized since 1552, a measure that alarmed even Catholic princes. His relationship with his great general Albrecht von Wallenstein ended with the general's dismissal and assassination in 1634. After the imperial victory at Nördlingen that year, Ferdinand concluded the Peace of Prague with most German Protestant estates in 1635, though the wider war continued.

Ferdinand married first Maria Anna of Bavaria, his Wittelsbach first cousin and mother of his children, and after her death Eleonora Gonzaga of Mantua. He died in Vienna in 1637 and was buried at Graz, succeeded by his son Ferdinand III, to whom he left an empire still at war but a Habsburg monarchy more consolidated and more firmly Catholic than he had found it.