Robert Bireley's political biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (r. 1619–1637) is the first one in English and the first since Johann Franzl's Ferdinand II. Kaiser im Zwiespalt der Zeit (1978). The new book comes appropriately from an expert on the political and religious history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and especially on the maelstrom of the Thirty Years War. In The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War (2003), Bireley explored the connections between religion and politics by looking at Jesuit confessors at the belligerent courts. His Religion and Politics in the Age of the Counterreformation (1981) revealed the political influence of William Lamormaini, Jesuit confessor to Ferdinand II. It covered imperial politics from 1624 to 1637, and Bireley has rewritten material from this book for Ferdinand II. Despite the overlap, the new study places the emperor at the center of its political analysis, and is particularly timely given the revival of scholarship on the Thirty Years War, which includes Peter Wilson's magisterial Europe's Tragedy (2009) and The Ashgate Research Companion to the Thirty Years' War (2014).
Bireley's principal contribution is to emphasize Ferdinand's commitment to political leadership, arguing that he should not be dismissed as a mere lackey of the Jesuits incapable of taking important decisions. Notwithstanding the potential distraction from the business of government provided by his penchant for hunting and musical performances, Ferdinand, first as archduke of Inner Austria and then as emperor, took the responsibility of leadership seriously. Political leadership, he believed, had to be consonant with the moral and religious principles of Catholicism. This belief did not deter him, however, from risking excommunication by arresting in 1618 Cardinal Melchior Klesl, chief advisor to Emperor Matthias at the time, out of fear of his tolerant approach to Protestants in the empire and because of his apparent opposition to Ferdinand's succession as emperor. “A stickler for legality” (307), Ferdinand decided against his own Catholic sensibilities to honor Matthias's Letter of Majesty, which guaranteed religious toleration for Protestants in Bohemia, but his strategy was to limit his own adherence to this law to a strict, literal interpretation. Ferdinand's respect for law explains, in part, why he maintained the often truculent estates in Habsburg Austria and Bohemia. His was a “moderate absolutism” (123), grounded in the throne's alliance with the Catholic Church and the aristocracy, which dominated the estates in the Habsburg territories. This was his lasting, posthumous political legacy to a powerful, resurgent Habsburg monarchy.
In the main, Bireley's portrait of Ferdinand as a ruler sincere about his loyalty to Catholicism and moral principle in governance is persuasive. The brief section on the demise of his famous general, Albrecht Wallenstein, is consistent with this portrait. Bireley represents Wallenstein's death in 1634 as an execution carried out at the behest of an emperor who proceeded justifiably against a rebel. The controversial killing of Wallenstein deserves fuller treatment, however, in light of an alternative interpretation. For instance, Geoff Mortimer has called the plan to kill Wallenstein an “assassination” and described the brutal “murder” of Wallenstein, fellow officers, and his servants. The secret tribunal whose judgment paved the way for killing Wallenstein deliberated without concrete evidence, and Mortimer presents the Habsburg effort to justify the general's death as unfounded (Wallenstein: The Enigma of the Thirty Years War [2010]).
One of the enduring debates about the Thirty Years War addresses its relationship to religion. In Europe's Tragedy, Wilson argues that the war was not primarily religious, and Bireley would agree, to a certain extent. For Ferdinand and his advisors, the Bohemian revolt that had started the war was essentially a political, not a religious, struggle. That is how Martin Becan, Ferdinand's confessor until 1624, represented it, and after the revolt, Ferdinand expelled Calvinist preachers from Bohemia “for political not religious reasons” (122). Religion did not motivate King Christian IV, who later initiated the Danish phase of the war (1625–1629). Yet, with the Edict of Restitution (1629), Bireley identifies an important shift in the nature of the war: it was “the measure that most clearly stamped the Thirty Years War as a religious conflict and represented a tragic overreach on the part of Ferdinand and other Catholic princes” (194). For Bireley, Ferdinand's decision by means of the Edict to restore to the Catholic Church property that had been absorbed by Protestant rulers after the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 “reveals most clearly the religious dimension of the war” (208).
Bireley compellingly presents Ferdinand's adoption of and adherence to the Edict of Restitution as his great political mistake. It stirred up opposition from the German Protestant estates and cost Ferdinand a crucial ally in John George, the Lutheran elector of Saxony. At the Electoral Convention in 1630, the Catholic estates supported Ferdinand and the Edict. The confessional division thwarted Ferdinand's aim of restoring peace to the empire, the war continued, and the invasion in 1630 by King Gustaus Adolphus at the head of a Swedish army reversed previous imperial successes in the war.
The Peace of Prague (1635) signalled Ferdinand's abandonment of the Edict of Restitution: “it amounted to a significant achievement for Ferdinand and a major shift in his thinking,” and was “a milestone in German history” because it allowed Catholic and Protestant armies to combine forces, thus “greatly reduc[ing] the religious nature of the war” (290). Ferdinand accepted the Protestant acquisition of ecclesiastical property after 1555, but he pressed his claim to make Habsburg Austria and Bohemia Catholic. He remained a Counter-Reformation ruler, but his Catholic politics were territorially circumscribed.
Bireley's biography reveals the struggle between principle and pragmatism in imperial politics. It underlines for students and scholars alike the historical significance of Ferdinand II. Thanks to this study, they can now better appreciate Ferdinand's place in imperial and Austrian history, as well as his role in the Thirty Years War.
