Aftermath
Ferdinand IV predeceased his father, dying of smallpox on July 9, 1654.
The imperial election of 1653 was an imperial election held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It took place in Augsburg on May 31.
This was the first imperial election to take place after the Thirty Years' War.
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.
On August 26 and 27, 1619, the Protestant estates of Kingdom of Bohemia deposed the Catholic king Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor and invited the Lutheran elector of the Electoral Palatinate, Frederick V of the Palatinate, to take his place. This Bohemian Revolt was put down with the help of the Catholic League, a confederation of Catholic princes of the empire. The league's leader, Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, was granted the Upper Palatinate and its electoral rights in a treaty of 1619, confirmed at the Diet of Regensburg on February 25, 1623.
The revolt ignited a broader religious war across Germany, the Thirty Years' War, which would involve not only the states of the empire but also Sweden, the Dutch Republic, France, Denmark–Norway, England, Scotland, Spain and Hungary and which would kill some eight million people before its end. The Peace of Westphalia which ended the war in 1648 revived the principle of cuius regio, eius religio established in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg and established the modern concept of Westphalian sovereignty. It additionally reinstated the electoral rights of the Electoral Palatinate, though not its territorial rights in the Upper Palatinate. Bavaria was raised to the Electorate of Bavaria, bringing the number of electors of the empire to eight.
Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor called for the election of his successor. To avoid a tie, his son, Ferdinand IV, King of the Romans, king of Bohemia and the presumptive favorite, agreed to abstain. The remaining seven electors were:
Ferdinand IV was elected.
Ferdinand IV predeceased his father, dying of smallpox on July 9, 1654.
The prince-electors, or electors for short, were the members of the electoral college that elected the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
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.
The Treaty of Fontainebleau was signed on 30 May 1631 during the Thirty Years' War, at the Palace of Fontainebleau. It was a pact of mutual assistance between Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, and France, for a period of eight years.
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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