City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court, 1600-1740

8 Building Anew

When the victory celebrations ended, Leopold I and the court settled at Linz until Vienna could be cleaned up and the Hofburg, which had drawn the heaviest .. Turkish artillery fire, made at least partly habitable. The court's continued absence produced the usual delays in communication between the crown and its deputies in Vienna. At the same time, the stricken city was temporarily relieved of the burdens imposed on it when the court was in residence. The first important business was to bury the dead, clear away the rubble, and clean the streets. Only then could the survivors begin to restore the badly battered fortifications and the Hofburg, and rebuild their houses. In the Leopoldstadt, trenches had been dug to take the many bodies, human and animal, that had accumulated during the fighting. These were apparently left open for burials all during the winter, but when the spring thaw came, the city council ordered the local authorities in that district to close them quickly.l Debris piled in the streets took longer to deal with. Though the Turks did not enter the city, their cannon balls and firebombs did, leaving isolated piles of rubble to clear where buildings had burned or collapsed. Clearing these was no easy matter, for the city suffered a drastic decline in its tax base just when the urgent need to rebuild pushed up wages for day labor. 157 Chapter 8 In July 1684 the city asked the Lower Austrian government to command the prelates of the Schottenkloster to remove the rubble between the city gate and the Herrengasse so that the street could be repaved.2 The debris still covered half the street with trash and left the rest covered with an oozing slime washed out of it by the rain. Since the prior, as usual, had paid no attention whatever to communications' from the city, the council appealed for an order in the emperor's name demanding either that the monks remove the mess or pay to have the city do it for them. While the city could enlist the crown in its effort to· get the Church to bear a part of the responsibility for reconstruction, . it had also to fape the unpleasant fact that the crown's responsibility for military security might well bring even greater problems in its wake. This, in fact, is what happened immediately after the siege when Starhemberg, the city commandant, decided to take advantage of the wasted suburbs to extend the glacis and add new outworks to the fortifications in several areas. To do so, he ordered the removal and clearing away of several clusters of houses, now in ruin. At first the city went along with the military, ordering the city's undertreasurer to implement the orders within four weeks or threaten the owners with confiscation .of whatever remained of their buildings.3 When the owners of these properties responded with the usual indignation, however, the city supported them, claiming that their loss would mean a decline of over one thousand Gulden in municipal tax revenue.4 Such protests were partly ritual, for the city did not intend to stand against improving its fortifications. When one of the buildings to be torn down proved to be the old municipal shooting gallery in the Alserstrasse, where the citizens had "practiced their praiseworthy exercise since ancient times," the city fathers had no difficulty finding a sportsman willing to sell them a garden plot further away from the walls. Within weeks work had begun on a new facility.5 There was no difficulty with the financing, and no time was lost in getting building materials delivered to the site so that the interruption in shooting practice would be as short as possible. Munic~pal financial problems seemed to be almost insurmountable . Vienna's projected expenditures presumed a city 158 Building Anew largely intact, and Vienna was anything but that in the fall of 1683, the usual time for collecting municipal taxes. That process was understandably delayed, but even so, in January 1684 the city council was reduced to urging the undertreasurer to get everything he could from the suburbs, even if it meant taxing piles of rubble or confiscating the debris and selling the salvaged materials for whatever he could get.6 Appeals to the emperor to postpone the city's contributions for four to six years got no hearing , for the imperial treasury was equally short...