Holy Roman Emperor (1619–37), king of Bohemia (1617–27) and of Hungary (1618–26). He was educated by the Jesuits and developed into a determined spokesman for Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Before his election to the imperial throne, he used authoritarian measures against the Protestants of Inner Austria, with some success, but in 1619 the largely Protestant Bohemian Diet deposed him in favour of Frederick V (the Winter King). This crisis was one of the opening moves in the catastrophic Thirty Years War. The first ten years of the conflict did not go badly for Ferdinand. He reached his high point when he issued the Edict of Restitution (1629), which ordered the return of all Roman Catholic property seized since 1552. Subsequently he was seen as a threat to German liberty and opposed by both Catholic and Protestant princes. The interventions of Sweden and France finally turned the tide of the war against him, and he was forced to abandon his more extreme Catholic absolutist ambitions.