The emperor who ended the Thirty Years' War also composed music
Ferdinand III inherited the Holy Roman Empire in 1637, deep into the Thirty Years' War, and set aside his father's rigid belief in divine right to seek a way out. Defeats forced painful compromises that led to the Peace of Westphalia. He was also the first Habsburg ruler recognised as a composer.
Born in Graz on 13 July 1608, the third son of Emperor Ferdinand II, he was educated by Jesuits and trained in soldiering by Christoph Simon von Thun. The deaths of two elder brothers made him heir. He became King of Hungary in 1625 and King of Bohemia in 1627, where a Revised Land Ordinance stripped the Bohemian estates of their right to raise troops and reserved it for the crown. In 1631 he married his cousin Maria Anna of Spain after long negotiations, with festivities stretching over fourteen months despite the war.
Frustrated at being kept from command, he sided with Albrecht von Wallenstein's enemies at court. After Wallenstein's assassination he took charge of the imperial army in May 1634, retook Regensburg and Donauwörth from the Swedes, and shared in the decisive victory at Nördlingen that September alongside Spanish forces, although his own part in the battle was modest. The Swedes fell back to northern Germany, and his political standing rose.
Becoming emperor on his father's death in February 1637, he ruled lands exhausted by two decades of fighting, with populations shrunken, impoverished and uprooted. French intervention reignited the conflict, and Swedish victories at Wittstock, Breitenfeld and finally Jankau in March 1645, where he was present, pushed a Swedish army towards Vienna. He paraded around the city with an image of the Virgin Mary to lift morale before leaving it.
Peace talks in Münster and Osnabrück ran from 1644 to 1648 while the fighting went on. Ferdinand had to admit all imperial estates to the congress and scale back his aims as the military picture worsened; surviving papers suggest a conscientious ruler willing to make hard decisions. His imperial authority emerged weakened, yet his hold on Austria, Bohemia and Hungary was firmer than his predecessors' before 1618. He died on 2 April 1657.
Source: Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor
