Duke Ernest of Bavaria (13 June 1500 – 7 December 1560) was the Administrator of the dioceses of Passau and Salzburg and pledge lord of Glatz.

He was the third son of Duke Albert IV of Bavaria-Munich and his wife Kunigunde, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III.

After Albert died in 1508, the Bavarian court historian Johannes Aventinus was entrusted with providing Ernest with a suitable education.

Ernest and Louis travelled to Italy, here he worked in Pavia and attended lectures from the famous legal scholar Jason Magnus.

He soon became a member of Sodalitas Ingolstatiensis, a literary society founded by Aventinus, after a suggestion by the Humanist Conrad Celtis.

With the support of Emperor Maximilian I the brothers William and Louis, succeeded in 1514 to have Ernest appointed Coadjutor of Bishop Wiguleus Fröschl of Marzoll in Passau.

In 1524 he joined an alliance between the South German bishops, the dukes of Bavaria and the Archduke Ferdinand to enforce the Edict of Worms.

On his instigation, the Reformer Leonhard Kaiser was handed over to the secular authorities in 1527 and burned at the stake in Schärding, then part of the district of Burghausen.

He carried out transactions to Vienna, Prague, Leipzig and Antwerp, and maintained close relations with the South German trading cities.

In accordance with the agreement from 1516, the brothers William and Louis sought to ensure that Ernest would be the next person to rule the Archdiocese of Salzburg.

When the end of his ecclesiastical career loomed, Ernest purchased the County of Glatz from Jan IV of Pernštejn in 1549.

To round off his possessions, Ernest purchased in 1556 the East Bohemian Lordships of Rychnov nad Kněžnou, Litice Castle, Potštejn,[1] Solnice and Černíkovice.