Ferdinand I (dec 17, 1556 – jul 25, 1564)

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second son of Philip the Fair and Joanna of Castile. Before his accession in 1556, he ruled the Austrian hereditary lands of the Habsburgs in the name of his elder brother Charles V. Also, he often served as Charles' representative in Germany and developed useful relationships with German princes.
The key events during his reign were the contest with the Ottoman Empire, which in the 1520s began a great advance into Central Europe, and the Protestant Reformation, which resulted in several wars of religion. Ferdinand was able to defend his realm and make it somewhat more cohesive, but he could not conquer the major part of Hungary. His handling of the Protestant Reformation proved more flexible and more effective than that of his brother and he played a key part in the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which started an era of peace in Germany.
According to the terms set at the First Congress of Vienna in 1515, Ferdinand married Anne Jagiellonica, daughter of King Vladislaus II of Bohemia and Hungary on 22 July 1515. When his brother-in-law Louis II (Vladislaus's son) was killed at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, Ferdinand succeeded him as king of Bohemia. A more difficult task was the takeover of power in Hungary, where Ferdinand was not the only one to be proclaimed king: the Hungarian Estates refused to recognize Ferdinand’s claim and elected the nobleman John Zápolya in his stead. Furthermore, a common border with the Ottoman Empire constituted a permanent threat, with Vienna being besieged by Ottoman troops for the first time in 1529. Zapolya had allied with Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent for support, and In 1532 Ferdinand made peace with the Ottomans, splitting Hungary into a Habsburg sector in the west ("Royal Hungary") and John Zápolya's domain in the east, the latter effectively a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.
Ferdinand was also a patron of the arts. He embellished Vienna and Prague, and invited Italian architects to his realm. He also gathered some humanists, many of whom had a big influence on his son Maximilian.
Ferdinand died only eight years after his accession. Although it had been intended that Charles’s son Philip II should succeed Ferdinand as emperor and that the imperial crown should alternate between the Spanish and the Austrian line, it finally remained with the Austrians. Ferdinand distributed the Austrian lands amongst his three sons. Maximilian received Danubian Austria (present-day Lower and Upper Austria) and the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia; Ferdinand was ruler in Tyrol and the Austrian territories in Swabia and Alsace; and Inner Austria fell to the youngest son Charles. The tripartite division led to the archducal seats of Graz and Innsbruck becoming centres of the Counter-Reformation.

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