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

1 The Historic Setting

Modern Vienna is the latest settlement to occupy a low rise along the southernmost of the many branches the Danube River forms as it flows from the Vienna Woods eastward onto the plain sloping toward Hungary. Recent excavations there confirm the presence of concentrated settlement thousands of years before the Romans built the camp of Vindobona. This modest fortress, one of a series of border stations along the river, had some strategic importance, but it did not compare in extent, population, or amenities with the great administrative and market center at Carnuntum, a day's journey downstream. When the Roman world collapsed in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Vienna basin played host to many migrating peoples wandering from the east into central Europe, picking at the bones of the now-vanished Roman state. The Danube ceased to be a frontier in any sense and became instead a natural highway . This change made Vienna's location crucial, for here alone, where the river formed many channels, could it be easily bridged. Upstream the next convenient crossing was at Regensburg, while downstream heavy currents and the river's great size made permanent bridges almost impossible given the existing technology. Charlemagne's Frankish warriors invaded the region from the west in an attempt to destroy the Avars, an eastern 5 Chapter 1 horde then settled in western Hungary. Legend has the emperor stopping at Vienna in 791 longenough to command the founding of a monastery in what seemed then a pagan wilderness. A century later, the Magyars streamed into the region, undoing whatever order the Frankish monarchy had succeeded in establishing. It is possible that Vienna was abandoned completely for a time early in the tenth century. A d.ocument of 881 mayor may not refer to the city as "Venia"; in any event, the next certain reference to the city appears in the year 1030, when Margrave Adalbert may have refounded it as an advanced outpost against raiders from the eastern plains. Late in the tenth century, after Otto the Great had defeated the Magyars and revived the empire with papal blessing, the provinces of modern Austria were gradually settled by immigrants from Bavaria and Swabia, creating an eastern march against the Magyars. The name "Ostarichi," or Osterreich (Austria in Latin); appears first in a document of the very late tenth century, clearly referring to the eastern realms of the Bavarian duchy. The two central provinces of this margravate, Upper and Lower Austria, were divided not by the Danube, but by the small, easily fordable Enns River. Both provinces extended from the Bohemian Forest in the north to the Alpine ranges in the south. In time Lower Austria expanded eastward to the Leitha and March rivers, beyond which the Magyars still held sway. The often grudging but fruitful cooperation between feudal knights and monastic orders gradually created the conditions necessary for more secure existence in the eastern march. Trade began to move through the region, with the routes up and down the Danube crossing at Vienna the new route from Venice north toward Bohemia and Poland. By 1137 the town was referred to as a civitas, indicating that it was a fortified place with a market. At the same time, the Babenberg margraves, who held the region as fiefs of the Bavarian duke, began moving the center of their political and administrative operations eastward toward the Vienna basin. The sainted Margrave Leopold III (l0951136 ) built a castle on a summit west of Vienna, which still bears his name, overlooking the gap in the hills where the Danube flows out onto the plain. He had already been a longtime patron 6 The Historic Setting of the monks at Klosterneuburg just upstream from the Leopoldsberg , and toward the end of his life he founded a Cistercian monastery at Heiligenkreuz in the woods southwest of Vienna. In the reigns of St: Leopold's sons, Leopold IV (113641 ) and Heinrich "Jasomirgott" (1141-77), Vienna emerged as the real center of the Babenberg house. In 1156, the same year that Jasomirgott ,moved his residence from Klosterneuburg to Vienna, the Austrian margravate was elevated to the status of a duchy by the emperor, finally establishing its independence from Bavaria. The first detailed picture we have of medieval Vienna in the twelfth century reveals a crowded place already outgrowing its defenses. The original walls followed approximately the boundaries of the old Roman camp. Inside them urban...