Ferdinand III.

Ferdinand III., Grand-duke of Tuscany, and Archduke of Austria, was born at Florence, 6th May 1769. On his father's succeeding his own brother on the imperial throne in 1790, he succeeded to the government of Tuscany. Here he inaugurated many judicial, economical, and legislative reforms; encouraged commerce, founded hospitals, and opened up good roads through the state. A lover of peaceful progress, he remained strictly neutral in the first coalition against France, and was the first sovereign in Europe to recognise and treat diplomatically with the French Republic in 1792. Next year the combined menaces of Russia and England constrained him to relinquish his neutral policy and become a passive member of the coalition formed against France, but on the French occupation of Piedmont in 1795 he speedily reassumed friendly relations with France. In 1797, in order to save his states from annexation to the Cisalpine Republic, Ferdinand concluded a treaty with Bonaparte on most unfavourable terms, undertaking to pay a war-levy to France, and to transfer to the Museum of Paris some of the chief masterpieces of the Florentine galleries, among them the 'Venus de' Medici.' The continued intrigues of France in his states drove him into an Austrian alliance, which furnished Bonaparte with a pretext for declaring war simultaneously against Austria and Tuscany. In 1799 Ferdinand retired to Vienna, leaving the French troops in occupation of Tuscany, and in 1801, at the peace of Lunéville, he was forced to renounce all claim on Tuscany. The peace of Paris, however, reinstated him in Tuscany in 1814, and even restored his art-treasures. He died 17th June 1824.