Vienna
Vienna is the capital, most populous city, and one of the nine states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. Its larger metropolitan area has a population of nearly 2.9 million, representing nearly one-third of the country's population. Vienna is the cultural, economic, and political centre of the country, the fifth-largest city by population in the European Union, and the most populous of the cities on the river Danube.
The city lies on the eastern edge of the Vienna Woods, the northeasternmost foothills of the Alps, that separate Vienna from the more western parts of Austria, at the transition to the Pannonian Basin. It sits on the Danube, and is traversed by the highly regulated Wienfluss. Vienna is completely surrounded by Lower Austria, and lies around 50 km west of Slovakia and its capital Bratislava, 50 km northwest of Hungary, and 60 km south of Moravia.
The Romans founded a castrum at Vienna, which they called Vindobona, in the 1st century, when the region belonged to the province of Pannonia. It was elevated to a municipium with Roman city rights in 212. This was followed by a time in the sphere of influence of the Lombards and later the Pannonian Avars, when Slavs formed the majority of the region's population. From the 8th century on, the region was settled by the Baiuvarii. In 1155, Vienna became the seat of the Babenbergs, who ruled Austria from 976 to 1246. In 1221, Vienna was granted city rights. During the 16th century, the Habsburgs, who had succeeded the Babenbergs, established Vienna as the seat of the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, a position it held until the empire's dissolution in 1806, with only a brief interruption. With the formation of the Austrian Empire in 1804, Vienna became the capital of it and all its successor states.
Throughout the modern era, Vienna has been among the largest German-speaking cities in the world. It was the largest in the 18th and 19th centuries, peaking at two million inhabitants before it was overtaken by Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century. Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations, OPEC and the OSCE. In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In July 2017, it was moved to the list of World Heritage in Danger.
Vienna is renowned for its rich musical heritage, having been home to many celebrated classical composers, including Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Haydn, Mahler, Mozart, Schoenberg, Schubert, Johann Strauss I, and Johann Strauss II. It played a pivotal role as a leading European music centre, from the age of Viennese Classicism through the early part of the 20th century. The city was home to the world's first psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. The historic centre of Vienna is rich in architectural ensembles, including Baroque palaces and gardens, and the late-19th-century Ringstraße, which is lined with grand buildings, monuments and parks.
Etymology
The precise origin of the name is uncertain. Vienna was known to the Romans as Vindobona, a borrowing of a Celtic toponym meaning either "white place" or "place of Vindos". This name disappeared from the record after the 6th century, occurring for the last time in Jordanes' Getica. The German name for the city, Wien – of which Vienna is a Latinised form – is unrelated, deriving from the River Wien. It occurs for the first time in the Salzburg Annals, which note that a battle was fought at a place named Wenia in the year 881. The name may ultimately mean "forest river", from Celtic *Vedunia.Bécs, the Hungarian name for Vienna, probably derives from a word meaning "kiln", and may date from a period in the 10th century when the region came under temporary Hungarian domination. In Romanian, the city is now called Viena, but the archaic names Beci and Beciu were used in chronicles. Romanian still has beci in use, a common noun meaning "cellar"; linguist Dan Alexe states both it and the aforementioned names of Vienna are believed to ultimately be derived from a word of the Turkic-speaking Avars, originally meaning "fortified place" or "treasury".
In Slovene, the city is called Dunaj, which in other Slavic languages denotes the River Danube.
In the Bavarian dialect of eastern Austria, the city is called Wean; however, this name is hardly used to any significant extent in the local city dialect anymore.
History
Roman period
In the 1st century, the Romans set up the military camp of Vindobona in Pannonia on the site of today's Vienna city centre near the Danube with an adjoining civilian town to secure the borders of the Roman Empire. Construction of the legionary camp began around AD 97. At its peak, Vindobona had a population of around 15,000 people. It was a part of a trade and communications network across the Empire. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius may have died here in AD 180 during a campaign against the Marcomanni.After a Germanic invasion in the second century, the city was rebuilt. It served as a seat of the Roman government until the fifth century, when the population fled due to the Huns invasion of Pannonia. The city was abandoned for several centuries.
Evidence of the Romans in the city is plentiful. Remains of the military camp have been found under the city, as well as fragments of the canal system and figurines.
Middle Ages
Irish Benedictines established monastic settlements in the 12th century; evidence of these connections includes the Schottenstift in Vienna, originally home to a community of Irish monks.In 976, Leopold I of Babenberg was appointed Margrave of the Eastern March, a frontier district of Bavaria centred along the Danube. This march gradually expanded eastward under successive Babenberg rulers, eventually evolving into the Duchy of Austria and incorporating Vienna and its surrounding areas. In 1155, Henry II, Duke of Austria, relocated the Babenberg residence from Klosterneuburg in Lower Austria to Vienna, coinciding with the founding of the Schottenstift. Following this relocation, Vienna became the permanent residence of the Babenberg dynasty. The city was occupied by Hungarian forces between 1485 and 1490. Around the beginning of the 16th century, Vienna became the seat of the Aulic Council, the central advisory body to the Holy Roman Emperor. Vienna served as the residence of the Habsburg emperors during their reigns from 1611 to 1740 and again from 1745 until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.
File:Vienna Battle 1683.jpg|thumb|The Siege of Vienna in 1683, by Frans Geffels
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Ottoman forces advanced toward Vienna on two notable occasions: the Siege of Vienna in 1529 and the Battle of Vienna in 1683, both of which resulted in the city's successful defence. In 1679, Vienna was severely affected by the Great Plague, which is estimated to have claimed the lives of nearly one-third of its inhabitants.
Austrian Empire and early 20th century
In 1804, during the Napoleonic Wars, Vienna became the capital of the newly formed Austrian Empire. The city continued to play a major role in European and world politics, including hosting the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15. The city also saw major uprisings against Habsburg rule in 1848, which were suppressed. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Vienna remained the capital of what became the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The city functioned as a centre of classical music, for which the title of the First Viennese School is sometimes applied. During the latter half of the 19th century, Vienna developed what had previously been the bastions and glacis into the Ringstraße, a new boulevard surrounding the historical town and a major prestige project. Former suburbs were incorporated, and the city of Vienna grew dramatically. In 1918, after World War I, Vienna became the capital of the Republic of German-Austria, and then in 1919 of the First Republic of Austria.From the late-19th century to 1938, the city remained a centre of high culture and of modernism. A world capital of music, Vienna played host to composers such as Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss.
The city's cultural contributions in the first half of the 20th century included, among many, the Vienna Secession movement in art, the Second Viennese School, the architecture of Adolf Loos, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle.
Red Vienna
The city of Vienna became the centre of socialist politics from 1919 to 1934, a period referred to as Red Vienna. After a new breed of socialist politicians won the local elections, they engaged in a brief but ambitious municipal experiment. Social democrats had won an absolute majority in the May 1919 municipal election and commanded the city council with 100 of the 165 seats. Jakob Reumann was appointed by the city council as city mayor. The theoretical foundations of so-called Austromarxism were established by Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, and Max Adler.Red Vienna is perhaps most well known for its Gemeindebauten, public housing buildings. Between 1925 and 1934, over 60,000 new apartments were built in the Gemeindebauten. Apartments were assigned based on a point system favoring families and less affluent citizens.