FERDINAND II. (1810-1859), king of the Two Sicilies, son of Francis I, was born at Palermo on the 12th of January 1810. In his early years he was credited with Liberal ideas and he was fairly popular, his free and easy manners having endeared him to the lazzaroni. On succeeding his father in 1830, he published an edict in which he promised to “give his most anxious attention to the impartial administration of justice,” to reform the finances, and to “use every effort to heal the wounds which had afflicted the kingdom for so many years”; but these promises seem to have been meant only to lull discontent to sleep, for although he did something for the economic development of the kingdom, the existing burden of taxation was only slightly lightened, corruption continued to flourish in all departments of the administration, and an absolutism was finally established harsher than that of all his predecessors, and supported by even more extensive and arbitrary arrests. Ferdinand was naturally shrewd, but badly educated, grossly superstitious and possessed of inordinate self-esteem. Though he kept the machinery of his kingdom fairly efficient, and was a patriot to the extent of brooking no foreign interference, he made little account of the wishes or welfare of his subjects. In 1832 he married Cristina, daughter of Victor Emmanuel I., king of Sardinia, and shortly after her death in 1836 he took for a second wife Maria Theresa, daughter of archduke Charles of Austria. After his Austrian alliance the bonds of despotism were more closely tightened, and the increasing discontent of his subjects was manifested by various abortive attempts at insurrection; in 1837 there was a rising in Sicily in consequence of the outbreak of cholera, and in 1843 the Young Italy Society tried to organize a general rising, which, however, only manifested itself in a series of isolated outbreaks. The expedition of the Bandiera brothers (q.v.) in 1844, although it had no practical result, aroused great ill-feeling owing to the cruel sentences passed on the rebels. In January 1848 a rising in Sicily was the signal for revolutions all over Italy and Europe; it was followed by a movement in Naples, and the king granted a constitution which he swore to observe. A dispute, however, arose as to the nature of the oath which should be taken by the members of the chamber of deputies, and as neither the king nor the deputies would yield, serious disturbances broke out in the streets of Naples on the 15th of May; so the king, making these an excuse for withdrawing his promise, dissolved the national parliament on the 13th of March 1849. He retired to Gaeta to confer with various deposed despots, and when the news of the Austrian victory at Novara (March 1849) reached him, he determined to return to a reactionary policy. Sicily, whence the Royalists had been expelled, was subjugated by General Filangieri (q.v.), and the chief cities were bombarded, an expedient which won for Ferdinand the epithet of “King Bomba.” During the last years of his reign espionage and arbitrary arrests prevented all serious manifestations of discontent among his subjects. In 1851 the political prisoners of Naples were calculated by Mr Gladstone in his letters to Lord Aberdeen (1851) to number 15,000 (probably the real figure was nearer 40,000), and so great was the scandal created by the prevailing reign of terror, and the abominable treatment to which the prisoners were subjected, that in 1856 France and England made diplomatic representations to induce the king to mitigate his rigour and proclaim a general amnesty, but without success. An attempt was made by a soldier to assassinate Ferdinand in 1856. He died on the 22nd of May 1856, just after the declaration of war by France and Piedmont against Austria, which was to result in the collapse of his kingdom and his dynasty. He was bigoted, cruel, mean, treacherous, though not without a certain bonhomie; the only excuse that can be made for him is that with his heredity and education a different result could scarcely be expected.
See Correspondence respecting the Affairs of Naples and Sicily, 1848-1849, presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, 4th May 1849; Two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen, by the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone, 1st ed., 1851 (an edition published in 1852 and the subsequent editions contain an Examination of the Official Reply of the Neapolitan Government); N. Nisco, Ferdinando II. il suo regno (Naples, 1884); H. Remsen Whitehouse, The Collapse of the Kingdom of Naples (New York, 1899); R. de Cesare, La Caduta d’ un Regno, vol. i. (Città di Castello, 1900), which contains a great deal of fresh information, but is badly arranged and not always reliable.
(L. V.*)
FERDINAND III. (1769-1824), grand duke of Tuscany, and archduke of Austria, second son of the emperor Leopold II., was born on the 6th of May 1769. On his father becoming emperor in 1790, he succeeded him as grand duke of Tuscany. Ferdinand was one of the first sovereigns to enter into diplomatic relations with the French republic (1793); and although, a few months later, he was compelled by England and Russia to join the coalition against France, he concluded peace with that power in 1795, and by observing a strict neutrality saved his dominions from invasion by the French, except for a temporary occupation of Livorno, till 1799, when he was compelled to vacate his throne, and a provisional Republican government was established at Florence. Shortly afterwards the French arms suffered severe reverses in Italy, and Ferdinand was restored to his territories; but in 1801, by the peace of Lunéville, Tuscany was converted into the kingdom of Etruria, and he was again compelled to return to Vienna. In lieu of the sovereignty of Tuscany, he obtained in 1802 the electorship of Salzburg, which he exchanged by the peace of Pressburg in 1805 for that of Würzburg. In 1806 he was admitted as grand duke of Würzburg to the confederation of the Rhine. He was restored to the throne of Tuscany after the abdication of Napoleon in 1814 and was received with enthusiasm by the people, but had again to vacate his capital for a short time in 1815, when Murat proclaimed war against Austria. The final overthrow of the French supremacy at the battle of Waterloo secured him, however, in the undisturbed possession of his grand duchy during the remainder of his life. The restoration in Tuscany was not accompanied by the reactionary excesses which characterized it elsewhere, and a large part of the French legislation was retained. His prime minister was Count V. Fossombroni (q.v.). The mild rule of Ferdinand, his solicitude for the welfare of his subjects, his enlightened patronage of art and science, his encouragement of commerce, and his toleration render him an honourable exception to the generality of Italian princes. At the same time his paternal despotism tended to emasculate the Tuscan character. He died in June 1824, and was succeeded by his son Leopold II. (q.v.).
Bibliography.—A. von Reumont, Geschichte Toscanas (Gotha, 1877); and “Federico Manfredini e la politica Toscana nei primi anni di Ferdinando III.” (in the Archivio Storico Italiano, 1877); Emmer, Erzherzog Ferdinand III., Grossherzog von Toskana (Salzburg, 1871); C. Tivaroni, L’ Italia durante il dominio francese, ii. 1-44 (Turin, 1889), and L’ Italia durante il dominio austriaco, ii. 1-18 (Turin, 1893). See also under [Fossombroni]; [Vittorio]; and [Capponi, Gino].
FERDINAND, MAXIMILIAN KARL LEOPOLD MARIA, king of Bulgaria (1861- ), fifth and youngest son of Prince Augustus of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was born on the 26th of February 1861. Great care was exercised in his education, and every encouragement given to the taste for natural history which he exhibited at an early age. In 1879 he travelled with his brother Augustus to Brazil, and the results of their botanical observations were published at Vienna, 1883-1888, under the title of Itinera Principum S. Coburgi. Having been appointed to a lieutenancy in the 2nd regiment of Austrian hussars, he was holding this rank when, by unanimous vote of the National Assembly, he was elected prince of Bulgaria, on the 7th of July 1887, in succession to Prince Alexander, who had abdicated on the 7th of September preceding. He assumed the government on the 14th of August 1887, for Russia for a long time refused to acknowledge the election, and he was accordingly exposed to frequent military conspiracies, due to the influence or attitude of that power. The firmness and vigour with which he met all attempts at revolution were at length rewarded, and his election was confirmed in March 1896 by the Porte and the great powers. On the 20th of April 1893 he married Marie Louise de Bourbon (d. 1899), eldest daughter of Duke Robert of Parma, and in May following the Grand Sobranye confirmed the title of Royal Highness to the prince and his heir. The prince adhered to the Roman Catholic faith, but his son and heir, the young Prince Boris, was received into the Orthodox Greek Church on the 14th of February 1896. Prince Boris, to whom the tsar Nicholas III. became godfather, accompanied his father to Russia in 1898, when Prince Ferdinand visited St Petersburg and Moscow, and still further strengthened the bond already existing between Russia and Bulgaria. In 1908 Ferdinand married Eleanor (b. 1860), a princess of the house of Reuss. Later in the year, in connexion with the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the crisis with Turkey, he proclaimed the independence of Bulgaria, and took the title of king or tsar. (See [Bulgaria], and [Europe]: History.)
FERDINAND, duke of Brunswick (1721-1792), Prussian general field marshal, was the fourth son of Ferdinand Albert, duke of Brunswick, and was born at Wolfenbüttel on the 12th of January 1721. He was carefully educated with a view to a military career, and in his twentieth year he was made chief of a newly-raised Brunswick regiment in the Prussian service. He was present in the battles of Mollwitz and Chotusitz. In succession to Margrave Wilhelm of Brandenburg, killed at Prague (1744), Ferdinand received the command of Frederick the Great’s Leibgarde battalion, and at Sohr (1745) he distinguished himself so greatly at the head of his brigade that Frederick wrote of him, “le Prince Ferdinand s’est surpassé.” The height which he captured was defended by his brother Ludwig as an officer of the Austrian service, and another brother of Duke Ferdinand was killed by his side in the charge. During the ten years’ peace he was in the closest touch with the military work of Frederick the Great, who supervised the instruction of the guard battalion, and sought to make it a model of the whole Prussian army. Ferdinand was, moreover, one of the most intimate friends of the king, and thus he was peculiarly fitted for the tasks which afterwards fell to his lot. In this time he became successively major-general and lieutenant-general. In the first campaign of the Seven Years’ War Ferdinand commanded one of the Prussian columns which converged upon Dresden, and in the operations which led up to the surrender of the Saxon army at Pirna (1756), and at the battle of Lobositz, he led the right wing of the Prussian infantry. In 1757 he was present, and distinguished himself, at Prague, and he served also in the campaign of Rossbach. Shortly after this he was appointed to command the allied forces which were being organized for the war in western Germany. He found this army dejected by a reverse and a capitulation, yet within a week of his taking up the command he assumed the offensive, and thus began the career of victory which made his European reputation as a soldier. His conduct of the five campaigns which followed (see [Seven Years’ War]) was naturally influenced by the teachings of Frederick, whose pupil the duke had been for so many years. Ferdinand, indeed, approximated more closely to Frederick in his method of making war than any other general of the time. Yet his task was in many respects far more difficult than that of the king. Frederick was the absolute master of his own homogeneous army, Ferdinand merely the commander of a group of contingents, and answerable to several princes for the troops placed under his control. The French were by no means despicable opponents in the field, and their leaders, if not of the first grade, were cool and experienced veterans. In 1758 he fought and won the battle of Crefeld, several marches beyond the Rhine, but so advanced a position he could not well maintain, and he fell back to the Lippe. He resumed a bold offensive in 1759, only to be repulsed at Bergen (near Frankfort-on-Main). On the 1st of August of this year Ferdinand won the brilliant victory of Minden (q.v.). Vellinghausen, Wilhelmsthal, Warburg and other victories attested the increasing power of Ferdinand in the following campaigns, and Frederick, hard pressed in the eastern theatre of war, owed much of his success in an almost hopeless task to the continued pressure exerted by Ferdinand in the west. In promoting him to be a field marshal (November 1758) Frederick acknowledged his debt in the words, “Je n’ai fait que ce que je dois, mon cher Ferdinand.” After Minden, King George II. gave the duke the order of the Garter, and the thanks of the British parliament were voted on the same occasion to the “Victor of Minden.” After the war he was honoured by other sovereigns, and he received the rank of field marshal and a regiment from the Austrians. During the War of American Independence there was a suggestion, which came to nothing, of offering him the command of the British forces. He exerted himself to compensate those who had suffered by the Seven Years’ War, devoting to this purpose most of the small income he received from his various offices and the rewards given to him by the allied princes. The estrangement of Frederick and Ferdinand in 1766 led to the duke’s retirement from Prussian service, but there was no open breach between the old friends, and Ferdinand visited the king in 1772, 1777, 1779 and 1782. After 1766 he passed the remainder of his life at his castle of Veschelde, where he occupied himself in building and other improvements, and became a patron of learning and art, and a great benefactor of the poor. He died on the 3rd of July 1792. The merits, civil and military, of the prince were recognized by memorials not only in Prussia and Hanover, but also in Denmark, the states of western Germany and England. The Prussian memorials include an equestrian statue at Berlin (1863).