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

9 Expanding the City

Vienna's city council had long looked toward developing the areas beyond the walls as a means to increase its tax base. As early as July 1664, the city's repeated complaints about the accumulated loss of taxes moved the crown to summon a conference of commissioners representing the Lower Austrian Regierung, the Hofkammer, and members of the city council. Its intended purpose was to discuss compensating the city for its losses by extending the Burgfrieden, the city's privileged jurisdiction, into the suburbs.l From the crown's viewpoint, however, the main business of the conference was to settle in advance the areas that would have to be demolished in order to make way for improvements on the fortifications; but as the commission determined in its report in September 1664, in order to do that it was first necessary to establish and survey the actual boundaries of the Burgfrieden.2 The city's representatives, sensing a willingness on the part of the crown to reimburse them for their loss of income, optimistically proposed including in their fiscal jurisdiction the parish of St. Ulrich and the Neustift, areas belonging to the Schottenkloster, both of which adjoined the recognized Burgfrieden in the Lerchenfeld. They also asked for six other areas, then under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It was an expansive program which, if carried through, would have established at one stroke 171 Chapter 9 nearly homogeneous, municipal, fiscal jurisdiction over the most valuable developed part of the intermediate band of settlement between the city walls and· the outlying villages. After the commissioners submitted their report, they waited while nothing happened. By the end of the year, the city's delegates complained to.the city council that none of the interested parties would appear at the hearings the commission scheduled to collect information and opinion on the subject.3 It was not until January 1666 that the Lower Austrian Regierung agreed to issue a peremptory summons to all interested parties to meet with the city commissioners and settle the matter. So far no records of such meetings have surfaced, if they were ever held at all; certainly noble and ecclesiastical landlords showed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for accommodating the city. It appears more likely that the city council found that pursuing a purely hypothetical expansion of municipal jurisdiction at the expense of influential landlords was not worth the effort. At the time, they were more interested in the growing probability that the crown would at last accede to the expulsion of the Jews, which in 1670 brought to the city the whole of the Jewish quarter, the now-renamed Leopoldstadt (see Chapter 6). Although the city's hopes for financial success from the sale of former Jewish houses never completely materialized, the incorporation of this area into the city largely occupied much of its administrative attention until the plague and siege distracted it entirely. Even such areas that the city did claim outside the walls were difficult to oversee, to some extent because residents of these parts of the Burgfrieden were not necessarily in favor of bearing the "municipal onera." As a shrinking tax base forced the city to increase taxes on real estate, homeowners found it increasingly advantageous to have their property registered in the Grundbuch of the Vizedom Amt or in the Lower Austrian Landbuch , both jurisdictions with lower property tax rates and both beyond the reach of the city magistrates. The city had long claimed for the Burgfrieden a group of houses on the Landstrasse and had built a low wall enclosing it to mark it off from the other jurisdictions. In 1677 the Vizedom Amt, apparently with the encouragement of the inhabitants, claimed this for its Grundbuch and began to break down the wall.4 172 Expanding the City The city appealed to the emperor, who agreed to initiate an inquiry, interviewing those living in the disputed area. The oldest inhabitants testified that the "marking stones" that the city claimed delineated the Burgfrieden had merely bee'n set there to mark a useful path. The dispute dragged on for a quarter century , interrupted only for the Turkish invasion 1682-88, and again in the late 1690s. The crown's dire need for money in 1704 brought the issue out for one more airing, one which ended with the crown ceding the area to the city in return for a' much needed special contribution to the war effort...