Death of the Emperor Ferdinand

Ferdinand III’s twenty years as Holy Roman Emperor fell between the reigns of two exceptionally dominating and effective emperors, his father, Ferdinand II, and his son, Leopold I. His reputation has suffered from the contrast. Successively Archduke of Austria from 1621, King of Hungary in 1625, King of Bohemia in 1627, and nominally the Austrian commander-in-chief from 1634, he became emperor in 1637 and was inevitably entangled in the Thirty Years War between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Germany and Central Europe which had been going on since his boyhood. Though himself a staunch Catholic, he favoured peace and eventually signed the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which recognised that the Protestant states in Germany had the right to exist.