Early Vienna

The early history of Vienna dates back to the Palaeolithic age around 35,000 years ago, evidence of which is the 25,000-year-old statuette, the Venus of Willendorf, which is today exhibited in the Naturhistorisches Museum.

Vienna, situated at a natural crossing of the Danube (Donau), was probably an important trading post for the Celts when the Romans arrived around 15 BC. The Romans established Carnuntum as a provincial capital of Pannonia in AD 8, and around the same time created Vindobona, a second military camp that was located in what today is Vienna’s Innere Stadt. A civil town flourished in the 3rd and 4th centuries, and around this time a visiting Roman Emperor, Probus, introduced vineyards to the hills of the Wienerwald (Vienna Woods). During this early period, Vindobona developed into a town of around 15,000 inhabitants and was important for trade and communication within the Roman Empire. Today, you can find remnants of this Roman town on Hoher Markt and Michaelerplatz.

The Babenberg Dynasty

In the year 976 a so-called Bavarian Ostmark (Bavarian Eastern March) was established along the Danube River, and this gradually expanded to the north and east, lending greater importance to Vienna. The Eastern March was ruled by the Babenbergs, a wealthy Bavarian dynasty that held onto power until 1248. During their reign, the Babenbergs expanded their sphere of influence to include modern-day Lower Austria and Vienna, Styria and much of Upper Austria. In 1156, under the Babenberg monarch Heinrich II ‘Jasmirogott,’ the Eastern March was elevated to a duchy (ie with its own duke and special rights) and Vienna became the capital. In 1221, two decades before the Babenberg dynasty died out, Vienna was granted its charter, achieving the status of a city.

Habsburg Vienna: Late Middle Ages & Renaissance

The Babenbergs moved their residence to Vienna in the mid-12th century, setting the stage for Vienna to grow considerably. By the late 12th century it had become a significant trading capital with links to Central and Western European capitals, Kiev (Ukraine) in the east, and Venice in the south.

In 1273 Rudolf von Habsburg was elected king of the Romans (Rudolf I), ruling over the Holy Roman Empire and beginning the era of the Habsburgs. The dynasty would retain power until the 20th century.

In the 14th century, Vienna struggled under a string of natural disasters that made everyday life more difficult for many residents; first a plague of locusts in 1338, then the Black Death in 1349, which wiped out one third of the city’s population, followed by a devastating fire. Despite these setbacks, the centuries following the rise of the Habsburg Dynasty to power gave Vienna a new scope of power. This was due in no small part to clever politicking on the part of monarchs and even cleverer marriages that catapulted this family of rulers to new heights.

In 1453 Friedrich III was elected Holy Roman Emperor and in 1469 persuaded the pope to raise Vienna to a bishopric. Friedrich’s ambition knew few bounds – his motto ‘Austria est imperator orbi universo’ (AEIOU) expressed the view that the whole world was Austria’s empire.

On the whole, the Habsburgs proved to be more adept at marriage than waging war. Maximilian I, the son of Friedrich III, acquired Burgundy through a clever marriage, while his son Philip the Handsome acquired Spain (and its overseas territories). The marriages of Maximilian’s grandchildren brought the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary. This prompted the proverb, adapted from Ovid: ‘Let others make war; you, fortunate Austria, marry!’

Maximilian, a ruler on the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, encouraged the teaching of humanism in Vienna’s university and also founded the Vienna Boys’ Choir.

Everyday Life

Everyday life in Vienna in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance was, of course, far removed from the pomp and circumstance of its Habsburg rulers. Hoher Markt was not only the city’s most important marketplace, it doubled as a site for Vienna’s many public executions for political as well as criminal activities. Being beheaded or quartered was the usual method there. At other sites around the city, convicted criminals were executed by drowning in the Danube or were burned alive.

In terms of improved health among the Viennese, the first public bath appeared around 1300. First mention of a public bath in Vienna is in 1300, and the first stone houses were erected around 1250. Fire and flooding were usual, and three earthquakes struck the city between 1267 and 1356. Furthermore, the rapid growth of Vienna led to the establishment of mendicant orders to feed the poor. These orders began arriving in Vienna in the mid-13th century, establishing monasteries and churches inside the city walls, such as the Minoritenkloster (Minoritenkirche), the Dominikanerkloster (later replaced by today’s church) and an Augustine monastery that was later replaced by another in the Hofburg. These monasteries also cared for travellers and pilgrims.

In comparison with other European cities, Vienna was one of the most stable, largely thanks to privileges ( Ratswahlprivileg; the city council election privilege) introduced in 1396 that saw the city council divided up equally among patricians, merchants and tradesmen, creating a wise balance of interests.

Turks & Religious Troubles

The 16th and 17th centuries – a time in Vienna’s history that included the high Renaissance and early Baroque – were marked by attempts by the Ottoman Turks to take the capital, by the Reformation and Thirty Years’ War, plague and, ultimately, an end to the Turkish threat, paving the way for high baroque.

The era began badly when Karl V became Holy Roman Emperor and left the governing of the Austrian territories in the hands of his younger brother, Ferdinand I. Ferdinand, a Spaniard by birth who did not even speak German, was an unpopular ruler who soon had to deal with attacks from the Ottoman Turks. The Turks, having overrun the Balkans and Hungary, were on the doorstep of Vienna by 1529. The city managed to defend itself under the leadership of Count Salm, but the 18-day siege highlighted glaring holes in Vienna’s defences. Against this background, Ferdinand moved his court to Vienna in 1533 (he’d spent most of his time outside it until then) and fortified the city’s walls, which now boasted bastions, ravelins (star-shaped reinforcements attached to the outer wall) and ramparts, as well as a ditch running around a perimeter, all of which followed the course of today’s Ringstrasse. He rebuilt the Hofburg in the 1550s, adding the Schweizer Tor (Swiss Gate) you see today, with his own royal titles engraved on it.

From 1517, the year Martin Luther called for Church reforms, the Reformation quickly spread to Austria. The nobility embraced the Reformation, and about four of every five burghers became practising Protestants. Soon after the Turkish siege of 1529, however, Ferdinand went about purging Vienna of Protestantism. He invited the Jesuits to the city, one step in the Europe-wide Counter-Reformation that ultimately led to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48).

Towards the end of the 17th century Vienna suffered terribly. The expulsion of the Jews left the imperial and city finances in a sorry state, and a severe epidemic of bubonic plague killed between 75,000 and 150,000 in 1679. One visible reminder of this today is the baroque Pestsäule, built shortly afterwards as a reminder of the bubonic plague. In 1683, four years after plague stuck, the city was once again under siege from the Turks. Vienna rebuffed this attack, however, and the removal of the Turkish threat helped bring the city to the edge of a new golden age.

The Golden Age of an Imperial City

When the Turks were beaten back from the gates of Vienna for the last time in 1683, the path was clear for Vienna to experience a golden age of baroque culture and architecture throughout the 18th century. During the reign of Karl VI from 1711 to 1740, baroque architectural endeavours such as Schloss Belvedere, the Karlskirche and the Peterskirche transformed Vienna into a venerable imperial capital.

When in 1740 the Habsburg dynasty failed to deliver a male heir, Maria Theresia ascended the throne (the first and only female Habsburg ever to rule). Maria Theresia took up residence in Schloss Schönbrunn, which she enlarged from its original dimensions dating from 1700, gave a rococo style, and had painted in her favourite colour (the distinctive ‘Schönbrunn yellow’). Although her rule was marred by wars – she was challenged by Prussia, whose star was on the rise, and by others who questioned the Pragmatic Sanction that gave her the right to the throne – Maria Theresia is widely regarded as the greatest of the Habsburg rulers. During her 40-year reign, Austria began to take the form of a modern state.

The talented joined the wealthy and the great who frequented the opulent Schönbrunn palace during the reigns of Maria Theresia and the reform-minded Joseph II. A six-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his 10-year-old sister performed in the palace’s Spiegelsaal in 1762, Josef Haydn and other composers worked in the palace theatre, and Vienna in the latter half of the 18th century (and beginning of the 19th) witnessed a blossoming musical scene never before or since found in Europe. During this time, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert all lived and worked in Vienna, producing some of their most memorable music.

Vienna in the Biedermeier Period

When in the early 19th century Napoleon swept across Europe, he triggered the end of the anachronistic Holy Roman Empire and the Kaiser who ruled it. The Habsburg Kaiser, Franz II, reinvented himself in 1804 as Franz I, Austria’s first emperor, and formally dissolved the Holy Roman Empire two years later, following Napoleon’s victory over Russian and Austrian troops in the Battle of Austerlitz (1805).

Vienna was occupied twice by Napoleon (1805 and 1809), and the cost of war caused the economy to spiral into bankruptcy. Following the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the European powers pieced together a post-Napoleonic Europe in the Congress of Vienna. The Congress was dominated by the skilful Austrian foreign minister, Klemens von Metternich. The period between the Congress of Vienna and 1848, the year a middle-class revolution took hold of Europe, is known as the Biedermeier period. During this period Franz I and von Metternich oversaw a period of repression that saw the middle classes retreat into private life to cultivate domestic music and a distinctive style of interior architecture, clothing and literature known as Biedermeier for its staidness and stuffiness (the word bieder means ‘staid’ or ‘stuffy’).

The lower classes suffered immensely, however: the Industrial Revolution created substandard working conditions, disease sometimes reached epidemic levels, and Vienna’s water supply was completely inadequate.

Vienna in the Late 19th & Early 20th Century

The repressive mood of the Biedermeier period in first half of the 19th century in Vienna culminated in reaction and revolution among the middle classes, with calls for reform and especially freedom of expression. In March 1848 the war minister was hanged from a lamppost. Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian who was decisive in shaping the repressive Biedermeier period, fled to Britain and Emperor Ferdinand I abdicated to be replaced by the 18-year-old Franz Josef I.

This liberal interlude was brief, however, with the army reimposing an absolute monarchy. In 1857 Franz Josef instigated the massive Ringstrasse developments around the Innere Stadt. In 1854 he married Elisabeth of Bavaria, affectionately nicknamed Sisi by her subjects. The couple lived together in the Kaiserappartements of the Hofburg, where today you’ll find the Sisi Museum.

In the latter half of the 19th century and going into the 20th century, Vienna enjoyed a phase of rapid development, including massive improvements to infrastructure. Universal male suffrage was introduced in Austro-Hungarian lands in 1906. Culturally, the period was one of Vienna’s richest; the years produced Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav Mahler, Johannes Brahms, Egon Schiele and Johann Strauss, as well as Otto Wagner, the most influential architect in fin de siècle Vienna and whose legacy is found throughout the city today.

Vienna: Capital of a Modern Republic

Vienna enjoyed enormous growth in the early 20th century. The century, however, is marked by two cataclysmic wars – WWI (1914–18) and WWII (1939–45) – as well as a ‘Red Vienna’ period in the 1920s, when left- and right-wing political forces clashed on Vienna’s streets, the Anschluss (annexation) by Hitler that saw Vienna and the Austrian Republic as a whole become part of the Third Reich, liberation by the Soviet Union and occupation by the Allied powers, and finally the proclamation of Austria as a neutral, independent country in 1955. Most of these events are associated with one or more iconic features of the capital.

Vienna’s neo-Gothic Rathaus is closely tied to the Social Democrats, who, following the collapse and abdication of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918, gained an absolute majority in all free elections from 1919 to 1996. The Palace of Justice, which was set on fire in 1927 by left-wing demonstrators following the controversial acquittal of members of the Frontkämpfervereinigung (a right-wing paramilitary group) on charges of assassination, perhaps best symbolises the political struggle of the era. This struggle culminated in several days of civil war in 1934. Hitler, who had departed Vienna many years before as a failed and disgruntled artist, returned to the city in triumph and held a huge rally at Heldenplatz (in the Hofburg) on 15 March 1938 in front of 200,000 ecstatic Viennese. A Holocaust memorial is dedicated to the Jews who suffered under Fascism.

In March 1945 the Soviet Union liberated Vienna, today celebrated by the Russian Heroes’ Monument on Schwarzenbergplatz, while Vienna’s UNO-City best symbolises the city’s post-WWII neutrality and evolution into a modern nation (even if in the 21st century its neutrality is somewhat lost beneath membership of the EU).