Ferdinand went into history as an uneventful king in all senses, as under his command the Spanish Empire passed a decade devoid of the kind of things that usually go into pop culture (wars, conquests, revolts, royal douchebaggery...), but by those very reasons he is considered a fairly good king, the first of the only two imperial Bourbons who were competent and stable kings overall alongside his younger half-brother Charles III, and among the few kings of the new dynasty that can be considered good rulers. By achieving the miracle of keeping Spain out of any conflict and promoting reforms that brought important scientific, literary, artistic and economic production, he helped Spain recover from its previous war of succession and secured its entry into The Enlightenment. Like his father Philip V, however, he had a fragile mental health all of his life and ultimately died in the midst of a tragic yet colourful insanity.
The youngest of the four sons of Philip V and his first wife, Maria Luisa of Savoy, he had a notoriously lonely early life, as his mother died of tuberculosis when he was just five months old, while his domineering stepmother Elisabeth Farnese only cared about the future of her own children, seeing him as an obstacle to her ambitions for their claims to the European thrones. His second oldest brother, Philip, died at two weeks old four years before Ferdinand was even born, while another brother, Philip Peter, suffered from poor health and died at the end of 1719 at the age of seven. The strict Spanish etiquette also prevented the princes to keep contact with their father, and they could only communicate with letters in French, the language used at court, which Elisabeth Farnese exploited to isolate Ferdinand from court and from his father. During this period, he only had one person for company, his only surviving older brother, Louis, who was six years older than him, and they had a close relationship, but Louis unfortunately passed away at just 17. This was only the beginning of a lifetime marked by either clinical depression or bipolar disorder, especially given that being properly in their rocker was not exactly a thing of the French royal lines. He grew to be a real life example of The Eeyore, insecure and mistrustful, and only found joy in shooting and music, especially in the famous Italian singer Farinelli, of whom he was a generous patron, as like with his father, his voice was capable of making him feel better.
His first chance to inherit the throne, when he was ten years old (after the premature death of all his three older brothers, including the heir and temporary king, Louis), was nullified by Elisabeth. The aristocracy did want Ferdinand to take the throne, as the good queen was unpopular among common people and noblemen alike for her treatment of her stepsonsnote and how she dominated the king, alongside the accusations she received for focusing too much on her ambition to put her children on European thrones, and for neglecting Spain's internal policy and ignoring the American territories (she was also unfavourably compared to her predecessor, Queen Maria Luisa of Savoy, beloved for her devotion to her adoptive country, her effective regencies despite her inexperience and young age, and her bravery and firmness when ruling in absence of Philip during the War of Spanish Succession). However, she was the one in command, and instead forced Philip V to return from his abdication and become king again despite the fact that his mental health was too weak to actually rule. Louis's death also left Ferdinand without the only person who had been close to him during his lonely childhood and making even more isolated.
Even when Ferdinand married Portuguese princess Barbara of Braganza, the court soon mandated a cloistered life for them that was almost house arrest, as Elisabeth and her followers feared that Ferdinand and Barbara could have any contact with the nobility who wanted him as a king as soon as possible: they could only receive visits from four people per day that are documented by Elisabeth herself, few specific ambassadors were allowed to visit them, they couldn't eat in public, they couldn't leave the palace, either for walks or for pilgrimages to visit temples, monasteries and convents, and the Queen Mother denied Ferdinand political power, excluded him from the Council of State and prevented him from visiting his father, keeping him and his wife isolated. Ferdinand himself was initially disappointed with Barbara, since she was unattractive, with scars from smallpox on her face and an unappealing robust physique, but she was very intelligent and cultured, and during the years as heirs where they had to live under house arrests, Ferdinand and Barbara got to know each other and fell deeply in love, sharing a love for music, and their happy marriage gave him one of the few pillars of support through his life.
As a trivia fact, their union was part of a literal Double In-Law Marriage of princesses performed by Spain and Portugal, with the ghosts of previous wars hopefully put behind, in an attempt to rebuild ties in the Iberian Peninsula. While Ferdinand married Barbara, her brother Joseph married his half-sister Mariana Victoria, all in a curious ceremony hosted on a bridge built for the occasion over the Caia river, which separates the two countries. Mariana Victoria's marriage was similarly happy in general, although Joseph's proneness to love affairs would annoy her to no end. Barbara, influential in the affairs of State, was especially focused on maintaining a good relationship between her home country and her adoptive country, alongside her father John V and the Portuguese ambassador. In her, Ferdinand found a faithful companion that never got involved in plots and schemes like his stepmother, which made her quite popular in Spain, and he relied on her advice.
Only after Philip V's death, did Ferdinand and Barbara manage to snatch control over their life. He finally became King of Spain, and one year later, by Barbara's advice, he kicked his scheming stepmother and her henchman the Marquis of Villarias out of the court. At the time, Spain was (typically) involved in a foreign war that promised few to no benefits, in this case the War of the Austrian Succession, but as soon as it ended, Ferdinand decreed a staunch policy of neutrality towards everybody in the world. He instead focused in reforming the Spanish Empire with the help of a chamber of Enlightened consultants, of which the greatest were the Francophile Zenón de Somodevilla, Marquis of Ensenada, and the Anglophile José de Carvajal y Lancáster, who formed a sort of duo of Friendly Enemies. The veteran Ensenada in particular was a invaluable asset for Ferdinand, issuing endless reforms to modernize the empire and continuing his previous job for Philip to strengthen the Spanish Armada, although this moved Great Britain to use their influence to have him disgraced so his plans of challenging their sea dominance never came to fruition. Ferdinand allowed the demotion after discovering, apparently for real, that the zealous Ensenada planned to start a private war against the British in spite of the king's neutral policy.
A more controversial measure, though, also undergone by Ensenada with Ferdinand's acquiescence, was the 1749 Great Gypsy Round-up, a state move (in the line of a similar measure by Portugal some years earlier) that attempted to eradicate the presence of Roma people in Spain, considered unruly and lazy people, by forcefully separating all their families and installing their men as miners, their women as factory workers and their children (if old enough) as a related workforce. As the goal of this policy was explicitly that of extinguishing their population, some have called it an attempt of genocide, although in this case nobody was meant to be killed, the method being simply to impede them from procreating so they would die off naturally. The project was ultimately a failure, in any case, as it lacked enough manpower and support by the population to be even feasible (only 9,000 people were arrested), and ultimately Romani people were instead exiled from Spain, except for those below the age of 14, which were put under the care of religious societies. Some have entertained that the policy only worsened the situation for the next centuries, completely alienating the remaining Roma community from Spanish society and driving it into its current rates of criminality and underworld-dwelling.
The aforementioned exchange of princesses had achieved a relative peace between the two conquistador countries, although it came at the cost of an improbable inner conflict. By bribing the Portuguese with large amounts of land in South America, which eventually doubled the size of Brazil, José de Carvajal convinced Portugal not to support British contraband nor engage in unauthorized expansionist adventures against Spain. This policy caused unrest among the Spanish Jesuits stationed in South America and the Guaraní indigenous communities which were ruled by the Jesuits: in the Spanish Empire the natives were legally protected against slavery, but in the Portuguese Empire they weren't (in fact, they were usual targets of slavery, especially at the hands of mestiços and other natives). Moving to Spanish territory would mean abandoning productive land and settlements where the Jesuits had enjoyed almost a theocracy, with their own governments and private armies. Thus, feeling abandoned by their country, the Jesuits and their natives revolted, so Spain and Portugal had to team up against them to drown the riot. Worse enough, the whole conflict was ultimately All for Nothing, as the peace achieved by the exchange was short-lived, and it would not take many years for Spain and Portugal to come to blows again after Ferdinand was gone.
Ferdinand's happy marriage with Barbara was only marred by the lack of heirs (Barbara didn't have a strong physical health, suffered from asthma and was only pregnant once as a result, giving him a son in 1733, but he was unfortunately stillborn), although he had enough half-brothers to ensure succession.
In 1758, however, Ferdinand saw his beloved wife die of illness, an event that absolutely sank his life. The fair king lost his sanity in the course of a year, known as the "Year without a King" because of his mental collapse, during which he became a recluse that was afraid of everything, refused to eat or talk, tried to bite people, danced around undressed, slept on chairs and pretended to be dead, among other bizarre anecdotes. Multiple times he tried to kill himself or asked for assisted suicide, but this was always denied to him, as the court had hope that he would recover. Experts are unsure whether all of this came solely from his crumbling mental health or was rather caused by a neurological right frontal lobe condition. In any case, he was clearly beyond recovery and died one year later at 45 due to health complications caused by the whole thing, putting an end to his existential misery and reuniting in death with his beloved.
The succession passed to his half-brother Charles, the oldest son of Elisabeth Farnese who had been busy meanwhile re-conquering the main Italian territories lost by Spain in the change of dynasties, ruling as the popular king of Naples. Proving to be another skilled, competent monarch, Charles built over what Ferdinand did and ensured his work would not be in vain - at least in the short run.
In media
Film- A Dashing Hispanic version of him appears briefly in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, played by Sebastián Armesto.
