He became the king at the age of only 8, in 1759, when his father Charles Spain, ascended the throne of Spain. Ferdinand was born in the Royal Palace of Naples on the 12th of January 1751. From 1759 to 1767, when reached his majority, the kingdom was ruled by a Regency Council who was receiving instructions from Madrid. The young sovereign was not interested in studying and he didn’t really dedicate himself to education.
He preferred hunting trips to books. When he was nineteen, he married Maria Carolina of Austria (daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria), who gave him 17 children and who had an important role in governing the kingdom, more and more oriented in favor of Austria. Even more when the Secretariat of State was entrusted to John Acton, faithful to the Queen, who gave great impulse to the reorganisation to the army and the fleet. After the French Revolution, the kingdom lined up against the French and the Jacobins in the First antifrench coalition in 1792. The Napoleonic expansion in Italy caused a new conflict with the French in 1798: the Neapolitan army attacked the Roman Republic and Ferdinand entered the city as a conqueror. It lasts only few days and a counteroffensive forced the Neapolitans to retreat. It was then that the king decided to leave Naples and move to Palermo. He stayed there for the entire duration of the Neapolitan Republic of 1779 and then until 1802, when he went back to Naples, starting a difficult restoration and repression.
Allied with the Austrians in the third antifrench coalition (1805), after the defeat of the latter by Napoleon , the Kingdom of Naples was in the expansionist projects of France. In February 1806, the troupes of the general Massena entered the city, but Ferdinand and the court already had protected themselves in Palermo. Napoleon declared the end of the Bourbon dynasty and decided Joseph, his brother, to be the king, until 1808, when he was proclaimed king of Spain, replaced in Naples by his brother-in-law Joachim Murat. Meanwhile Ferdinand strengthen his power in Sicily, supported by England. But the attempt to retake the control of the continental kingdom of Calabria failed.
In 1814 Maria Carolina died and the king united in a morganatic marriage with Lucia Migliaccio. On the fall of Napoleon, the following year Murat suffered a heavy defeat in Tolentino. The decisions of the Congress of Vienna and the treaty signed in Casalanza on the 20th of May 1815 opened the doors to the return of the Bourbons in Naples. Ferdinand went back to the capital on the 7th of June 1815. In December 1816 the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was instituted and Ferdinand took the corresponding title. The first Carbonari motions of 1820 involved Naples also, where the king was forced to to grant a Constitution, which he soon withdrew after the repression of the revolt.
On 4th of January, 1825 Ferdinand died after reigning for 65 years and three months. He was buried in the church of Santa Chiara. His son Francis I succeeded him.
