Counter-Reformation 83and chronologically to look at the most determined challenge to
Protestantism, that of the young Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, as he
then was, the later Emperor Ferdinand II.
In 1564 Ferdinand’s father Karl, a younger son of Emperor Ferdinand I,
had inherited Inner Austria, that is the provinces of Styria, Carinthia,
Carniola and Gorizia, where the majority of the inhabitants and most
of the nobility had converted to Lutheranism and were pressing for
religious freedom. The position of the Estates was considerably strength-
ened by the fact that this was frontier country, as although its long
eastern border was on to Habsburg Hungary this was only a relatively
narrow strip of land, and Ottoman Hungary lay directly beyond. The
Turkish threat and the associated need for money was ever present,
and the Estates knew how to use this to their advantage. After years
of friction Karl was eventually constrained to make the Bruck Pacifica-
tion in 1578, whereby he promised the Estates of his provinces jointly
assembled in the eponymous town that no-one would in future be
oppressed because of his religion, and that Lutheran preachers would
not be expelled from the principal cities. Although this was by no means
the Protestantcarte blanchewhich has sometimes been suggested it was
enough to earn Karl the opprobrium of his fellow Catholics, a warning
from the pope that he was endangering his own soul, and the disap-
proval of his ardently Catholic wife. In the remaining six years of his
life he hardened his position against the Protestants as far as he could
without actually breaking his word and withdrawing the Pacification,
but in his testament to his young son he pointedly noted that his suc-
cessors were not bound by it, urging him to do his utmost to return the
provinces to the true church.^3
Ferdinand, born in 1578 and only six at the time of his father’s death,
was in no position to respond to this exhortation for many years, but
both his temperament and his upbringing ensured that he would be
minded to do so as soon as the opportunity presented itself. His mother,
a Bavarian princess and the principal influence on the growing boy,
pointed him clearly in that direction, as did his education at the Jesuit
college in Ingolstadt, where his cousin, the later Duke Maximilian I of
Bavaria, was a fellow pupil, albeit five years older. Even by the highest
Catholic standards of the time Ferdinand was extraordinarily committed
to his faith, as Bireley notes:
Religion was the dominant force in his life. According to Lamormaini
[his confessor], each morning upon rising he devoted an hour to
meditation before he attended two Masses in his private chapel. In