Kaiser Ferdinand III (1608-1657)

Ferdinand III is not exactly, as Lothar Höbelt has claimed, the ‘Forgotten Emperor’. Having succeeded his father, Ferdinand II, in 1637 at the height of the Thirty Years War, he ruled for two decades during a period which in many respects determined the future development of the Empire, and of the Austrian Habsburg monarchy. He therefore appears frequently in specialist works on the Thirty Years War; nevertheless, as Höbelt suggests, he long remained a shadowy figure, eclipsed by his father. Traditional histories of the war lost interest after the 1635 Peace of Prague, while the last biography of him was written a century ago. Things have recently changed for the better. Scholars have devoted far more attention to the second half of the war—as is amply reflected in Peter Wilson’s magisterial recent synthesis, Europe’s Tragedy (2009; rev. ante, cxxviii [2013], 957–8)—while two archival, scholarly biographies of Ferdinand have appeared since 2008: the volume under review, and Höbelt’s own version of the story (Ferdinand III (1608–1657): Friedenskaiser wider Willen [2008]). In his bibliographical note to the book under review, Mark Hengerer writes that his biography was so well advanced by the time that Höbelt’s appeared that he had no time to take account of it. His comment that to engage with it would require the writing of a completely different book suggests that he was not impressed by Höbelt’s work

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