The most beautiful cities in Austria
Welcome to one of Europe’s most beautiful countries. Austria’s landscapes, regions and townscapes provide almost the full range of European variety in the centre of the continent. Austria is often associated, rightly, with winter sports, but there is so much more on offer. Its alpine areas are rugged and picturesque, but that’s far from being the whole story.
History
The intrigue of Austria’s past lies in how the medium-sized neutral nation with today’s modest population was once at the centre of European power.
The course of history laid the crown of the Holy Roman empire at the feet of the Habsburg dynasty. The Habsburgs chose to exercise their limited authority mostly from Austrian cities, chiefly Vienna. All this happened while the imperial electors had their own power bases in the lands covered by modern Germany.
The concentration of imperial power in Vienna, Graz, Linz and Innsbruck, as well as the might and prestige of the prince-archbishops of Salzburg, helped create a glittering legacy of culture and architecture in Austria’s chief cities.
Prehistory and Rome
Palaeolithic remains found in Austria include the so-called Venus of Galgenberg, about 36,000 years old and found north of Vienna. The more famous Venus of Willendorf figurine, about 25,000 years old, was found near Krems. Both are displayed in Vienna’s Naturhistorisches Museum.
Remains of the glacier man nicknamed Ötzi, more than 5,000 years old, were sensationally found in the mountains of the Tyrolean southern border region in 1991.
The rich Celtic Hallstatt culture of the 8th to 5th centuries BCE was based on mining salt deposits and produced about 2000 burial remains. Parts of the mines and some burials can be visited today in the lakeside town. Celtic remains are exhibits in many parts of the country. Notable is the bronze Strettweg cult wagon from about 600BCE at a small museum next to Schloß Eggenberg in Graz.
Three Roman provinces covered modern Austria south of the Danube. The most extensive settlement was called Carnuntum, capital of the eastern province Pannonia. Archaeological remains and reconstructions can be seen today. Another, Vindobona, gave its name to modern Vienna/Wien. Brigantium in Raetia gave its name to Bregenz and Iuvavum, in the central province Noricum, was on the site of modern Salzburg.
As Rome disintegrated, Slavic people and the Avars took over the eastern regions and the Germanic Bavarii migrated into the area of modern Austria in the 6th century. The Frankish empire established an eastern march in the 9th century.
The key to Austria’s national beginnings is in its German name, Österreich, first mentioned before the year 1000. This means “eastern territory”, the eastern end of the German empire of Charlemagne’s successors. Austria thus developed a separate identity long before there were nations called Germany or Italy.
The Babenbergs
In the 10th century the Austrian lands were dominated by the Bavarian Babenbergs, the first of two great dynasties at the head of Austrian affairs. A Carinthian duchy also appeared in this period. The Babenbergs stayed in power for 270 years, eventually ruling over duchies known as Austria, established in the mid-12th century, and Styria.
The early work of the church was in the hands of the bishops of Salzburg, who also became temporal princes, and their subject diocese Passau, which sent missionaries as far as modern Hungary. This began a long tradition of abbeys and ecclesiastical states in Austria’s history. The archbishops took much of their revenue from the region’s historical salt trade, which left its mark on the name of the city and other places in the region, including Hallein and Hallstatt through the ancient alternative word hall.
Rise of the Habsburgs
The Habsburgs were Swiss-based counts who moved to Vienna in the 13th century and took the title of dukes of Austria. Rudolf of Habsburg took over the Bohemian throne by defeating and killing the Přemyslid Bohemian king Ottokar II in 1278. He then won control over the duchies of Austria, Styria and Carinthia, amounting to domination of the lands covered by modern Austria.
For more than a century the family was engaged in efforts to secure the Bohemian throne and supremacy in the Holy Roman empire. The prince-archbishops of Salzburg also began grow their territory among the duchies.
In 1440 Friedrich III was named German king and imperial successor. From 1452, when he was crowned emperor, the Habsburgs dominated the imperial title, which was formally the gift of selected temporal rulers based in the territory of modern Germany. For 300 years they held the throne, for three decades exercising their authority from Prague and a decade from Innsbruck. Most of the rest of the time they ruled from Vienna, also assuming the Austrian title of archduke. The empire was then at its greatest extent, including virtually all of modern Austria.
Friedrich had married a Portuguese princess and in 1477 married his son Maximilian to the daughter of the ruler of Burgundy. This brought Austria back into the thick of western European affairs at a time when its policy had been moving into an eastern European orbit. This changed the relationship with France. Habsburg marriages throughout Europe were a policy for centuries.
Friedrich often used the motto AEIOU, a Habsburg device usually understood as standing for Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan in German or Austriae est imperare orbi universo in Latin, meaning "all the world is subject to Austria". Other interpretations have been offered.
Friedrich died in 1493 as the longest-serving emperor. He had constantly moved about in Austria and spent his later years in Linz. By this time he effectively shared the title with his son Maximilian I. But Innsbruck became the seat of the Holy Roman empire under Maximilian I, who ruled as heir apparent (king of Germany) after his father’s death and was emperor from 1508 to 1519.
Entanglements in Europe
Maximilian extended Habsburg power by marrying his son to the princess of Spain and was an able military leader, though his wars in support of his first wife’s Burgundian territory were costly.
From the accession of Charles V (by then ruler of Spain and the Netherlands) in 1519, several themes in Austrian history were in tension. As well as its involvement in Bohemian affairs to the north and Hungarian affairs in the east, the Habsburgs were locked in a rivalry with France because of their dynastic connection in Spain and the Netherlands and their opposition to French ambitions in Italy.
They also had to deal with the growing threat of the Ottoman Turkish empire and Vienna had to survive its first Ottoman siege in 1529. Austria thus became the bulwark of Christian Europe. From 1525 the Habsburgs dominated the throne of Hungary while Protestantism, which the Catholic Habsburgs opposed, was spreading through Germany.
Vienna was the imperial seat from the 1550s to the 1580s, when the emperors sat in Prague for about 30 years, and again from 1612 to the empire’s dissolution in 1806.
The Habsburg territories split, leaving Austrian and Spanish branches. But when the religious and political conflict of the Thirty Years War destroyed much of central Europe and the German lands, Austria came out the loser. After the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia rebalanced continental power in favour of France, Austria again turned eastward. It was able to beat off a second siege of Vienna by the Ottomans in 1683, thanks to forces under the Polish king Jan Sobieski.
Austria’s imperial policies entangled it in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) after the death of the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. It was also a political player in the War of Polish Succession (1733-35). It was then at the centre of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) when the male line ran out and rules had to be changed to allow Maria Theresa to succeed her father as queen of Austria.
Maria Theresa (known to Austrians as Maria Theresia) inherited the Habsburg lands in 1740, along with the determination of her father, Charles VI, to keep Habsburg Austria, Hungary and Bohemia united. Her policy placed her in conflict with the Prussian king Frederick the Great, who seized Silesia right at the start of her reign. She was also opposed by France and Bavaria.
But Maria Theresa deepened ties with Hungary and resisted her enemies while continuing through her children the policy of intermarriage through Europe. She held the Austrian throne until 1780 and secured the imperial throne for her husband, Franz Stephan of Lorraine, in 1745. The dynasty was thus renewed as Habsburg-Lorraine.
Their son, Joseph II, attempted Enlightenment reforms that became known as Josephinism. These included intervening to loosen the hold of lords over serfs, easing censorship and laws on the behaviour of Jews, and allowing Protestant and Orthodox worship. Joseph closed almost half the monasteries in his realms, distributed their revenues as poverty relief and created new parishes. He also reduced the territory of the bishopric of Passau, finding himself at odds with the pope and making many enemies. Eventually he had to walk back some reforms.
The limits of the Holy Roman empire lay in the fact that it was an umbrella for lots of small states, some of them ecclesiastical, and complex patterns of allegiances. The largest extent of this shifting territory was from the 11th to 16th centuries. At various times it included the German, Italian, Bohemian and Burgundian kingdoms, about 50 cities and many abbeys that answered directly to the imperial crown.
The usual count of states or statelike entities is well over 300, although one reckoning finds about 1800 separate territories spread over the empire’s nine centuries. They covered today's Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Czechia, Switzerland and Liechtenstein and parts of Italy, France, Denmark and Poland. The throne had to submit many decisions to a representative assembly (Reichstag) and derived much of its moral authority from the blessing of the pope in Rome.
The criticism usually offered of the Habsburg dynasty is that the rulers were too concerned with keeping their far-flung family territories – some outside the empire – together to be strong rulers. This involved many dynastic marriages that drew the Habsburgs into many wars and led to intermarriage of first cousins. But the Holy Roman empire was not truly a state and the dynasty thus depended on its own lands as the only source of revenue. Intermarriage helped preserve hereditary power, alliances and the longevity of the line at a time when proper candidates were limited by class.
Empire modernised
Napoleon’s expansion of French power had Austria as the main target and his domination of Germany put an end to the reduced empire in 1806. Napoleon created a confederation of German-speaking states and the emperor Franz I declared himself emperor of Austria, what is generally referred to as the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Ecclesiastical states such as Salzburg were abolished and the number of small states drastically reduced. The Austrian crown was afterwards restricted to Austrian, Hungarian, Bohemian, southern Polish and Balkan lands.
The Napoleonic empire lasted only a decade. The 1815 Congress of Vienna, in which the Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich played a leading role, redistributed the balance of European power to control French ambitions. Franz Joseph I took the throne in 1848 and granted modest constitutional reforms in the face of revolutions sweeping Europe.
With industrialisation, a middle class was on the rise and Vienna grew in affluence. The city’s fortifications were demolished and the Ringstraße and public parks created.
In 1867 Austria and Hungary were created as separate kingdoms under the Habsburg crown.
The start of World War I is often stated as starting with the assassination of the brother of the emperor Franz Joseph, the archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife at Sarajevo. It actually begins with Franz Joseph signing a declaration of war against Serbia at his family’s summer retreat at Bad Ischl after a controversial border incident. In alliance with Prussian Germany, Austria went to war against Russia, France and Britain and was attacked by Italy in 1915.
During the war food production and the economy failed. The end of Austro-Hungarian empire came at the end of World War I, when the last emperor Karl effectively stepped down by proclamation. The following year a republican Austrian government was elected and banned the Habsburgs from Austrian territory.
Nazism and World War II
By the 1930s the economic pressure of the Great Depression brought a right-wing government under Engelbert Dollfuß to power. Dollfuß was eager to avoid entanglement with the Nazi German government under Hitler and after a 1933 constitutional crisis ruled by decree, having locked out the republic’s national council. He sought and received the support of Benito Mussolini and his government from this point was dubbed Austrofascism.
After a February 1934 uprising by a social democratic militia in Linz, a four-day civil war broke out and Dollfuß declared a one-party constitution, seen by opponents on his right and left as a coup. He was assassinated by Austrian Nazis, though their attempted coup failed.
Since World War I there had been proposals to unify Germany and Austria. After Dollfuß, successor Kurt Schuschnigg tried to resist German pressure and maintained the Dollfuß constitution, which controlled the press. But in March 1938 German troops crossed the border, greeted as heroes by many citizens. Schuschnigg, who has called a plebiscite on the question for the next day, resigned and Hitler announced the annexation (Anschluß) of Austria, installing a puppet chancellor.
From that point the country shared the fate of Nazi Germany. In March 1945 US troops entered eastern Austria and a fortnight later Soviet troops entered Vienna. Austria, as part of the Third Reich, was divided into US, Soviet, British and French occupation zones. Vienna was separately divided, creating the power-sharing environment depicted in The Third Man.
The new republic
As Allied forces entered Austria, politician Karl Renner set up a coalition of non-Nazi representatives and declared Austria independent from Germany. The Allies were prepared to recognise his government and granted it limited powers the following year, while continuing the occupation.
A treaty in 1955 ended the four-power presence and a new Austrian government adopted a constitution that specified a neutral foreign policy on October 26, now the national day.
Vienna is now a popular venue for international conferences and an important UN headquarters. Austria joined the European Free Trade Association in 1960 and the EU in 1995. In 1999 it joined the eurozone.
