Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor

Ferdinand was born in 1578 to devout Catholic parents who sent him to the Jesuits at eleven to keep him clear of Lutheran nobles. He inherited Inner Austria months later when his father died, and by 1596 he was installed as its actual ruler. From 1598 he enforced hard Counter-Reformation policy: Protestant pastors expelled, special commissions sent to restore Catholic parishes, religious regulation treated as royal prerogative. Matthias died in March 1619; Ferdinand was elected emperor in Frankfurt on 28 August, two days after the Protestant Bohemian Estates had deposed him as their king. News of the deposition reached Frankfurt the same day he was crowned, but he didn't leave until the ceremony was done. What began in 1618 as the Bohemian revolt became, through Ferdinand's campaign to restore Catholicism as the empire's sole faith, a general war that swallowed the continent. It ended seventeen years after his death in 1637, and the empire's population didn't recover until 1710.