Elected
Frederick, after casting a vote for Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, duke of Bavaria, retracted his vote and joined the other six electors in voting for Ferdinand II, who was crowned in Frankfurt on September 9.
The imperial election of 1619 was an imperial election held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It took place in Frankfurt on August 28.
This was the sixth imperial election to take place during the Reformation. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, a professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, now part of the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, had delivered the Ninety-five Theses to Albert of Brandenburg, the elector of Mainz. This list of propositions criticized the practice of selling indulgences, remissions of the punishment meted out for sin in Purgatory. Luther's criticism snowballed into a massive schism in the church, and from there into a split among the states of the empire. By 1600, the elector of the Electoral Palatinate was Calvinist and the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg were Lutheran.
Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Hungary and Bohemia, was Catholic. In 1600 he was engaged in the Long Turkish War, which had drained the resources of his kingdoms and of the empire since 1593. On December 28, 1604, following military reverses and an economic crisis in Hungary, the Hungarian nobleman Stephen Bocskai launched a revolt. The Bocskai uprising lasted until 1606 and put additional pressure on Rudolf's resources. It was in this situation that Rudolf was forced to grant the Letter of Majesty in 1609, allowing the free practice of Protestant religions in Bohemia and creating a Bohemian Protestant state church run by the Protestant estates.
In 1617, Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor, by now Holy Roman Emperor and king of Hungary and Bohemia, arranged for the election of Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor as his successor in Bohemia under the terms of the Oñate treaty. The fiercely Catholic Ferdinand II had suppressed Protestantism on his lands in Styria and had repudiated the Letter of Majesty. When, in 1618, Ferdinand II sent his representatives, Vilém Slavata of Chlum and Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice, to Prague to administer the government, they were thrown from the third floor of Prague Castle by members of the dissolved Protestant estates.
On August 26, 1619, the estates of Bohemia deposed Ferdinand II and elected Frederick V of the Palatinate, elector of the Electoral Palatinate, as king. Frederick accepted. Nonetheless, the other electors refused to hear an embassy of the Bohemian estates and confirmed Ferdinand II as Bohemian king and elector, with only the Palatine delegation objecting. The remaining five electors were:
Frederick, after casting a vote for Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, duke of Bavaria, retracted his vote and joined the other six electors in voting for Ferdinand II, who was crowned in Frankfurt on September 9.
The prince-electors, or electors for short, were the members of the electoral college that elected the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Ferdinand II was Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia from 1619 until his death in 1637. He was the son of Archduke Charles II of Inner Austria and Maria of Bavaria. His parents were devout Catholics, and, in 1590, they sent him to study at the Jesuits' college in Ingolstadt because they wanted to isolate him from the Lutheran nobles. In July that same year (1590), when Ferdinand was 12 years old, his father died, and he inherited Inner Austria–Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and smaller provinces. His cousin, the childless Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, who was the head of the Habsburg family, appointed regents to administer these lands.
Frederick V was the Elector Palatine of the Rhine in the Holy Roman Empire from 1610 to 1623, and reigned as King of Bohemia from 1619 to 1620. He was forced to abdicate both roles, and the brevity of his reign in Bohemia earned him the derisive sobriquet "the Winter King".
The Catholic League was a coalition of Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire formed 10 July 1609. While initially formed as a confederation to act politically to negotiate issues vis-à-vis the Protestant Union, modelled on the more intransigent ultra-Catholic French Catholic League (1576), it was subsequently concluded as a military alliance "for the defence of the Catholic religion and peace within the Empire".
The Protestant Union, also known as the Evangelical Union, Union of Auhausen, German Union or the Protestant Action Party, was a coalition of Protestant German states. It was formed on 14 May 1608 by Frederick IV, Elector Palatine in order to defend the rights, land and safety of each member. It included both Calvinist and Lutheran states, and dissolved in 1621.
The Schmalkaldic War refers to the short period of violence from 1546 until 1547 between the forces of Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, commanded by the Duke of Alba and the Duke of Saxony, and the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League within the domains of the Holy Roman Empire.
Over its long history, the Holy Roman Empire used many different heraldic forms, representing its numerous internal divisions.
The Bohemian Revolt was an uprising of the Bohemian estates against the rule of the Habsburg dynasty that began the Thirty Years' War. It was caused by both religious and power disputes. The estates were almost entirely Protestant, mostly Utraquist Hussite but there was also a substantial German population that endorsed Lutheranism. The dispute culminated after several battles in the final Battle of White Mountain, where the estates suffered a decisive defeat. This started re-Catholisation of the Czech lands, but also expanded the scope of the Thirty Years' War by drawing Denmark and Sweden into it. The conflict spread to the rest of Europe and devastated vast areas of Central Europe, including the Czech lands, which were particularly stricken by its violent atrocities.
The Diet of Regensburg of 1623 was a meeting of the Imperial States of the Holy Roman Empire convened by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. The meeting was not technically an imperial diet in the full sense, but a convention of princes or Deputationstag – a looser constitutional format giving the emperor greater leeway to take decisions without being bound by formal procedures. At it the Electorate of the Palatinate was transferred to Maximilian I of Bavaria. The meeting marked the high-water mark of imperial power during the Thirty Years' War.
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