Vindobona
The Romans built a legionary camp here around 100 AD, on the Danube frontier, subordinate to the larger town at Carnuntum downstream. Marcus Aurelius is thought to have died at Vindobona in 180. The camp’s outline survives in the street plan of the first district — Hoher Markt sits on it, and there is an excavated section under the square.
Babenbergs and Habsburgs
The Babenberg margraves moved their seat to Vienna in 1155 and the city was walled with the ransom paid for Richard the Lionheart, held at Dürnstein in 1193. In 1278 Rudolf of Habsburg took Austria, and his family held it until 1918 — six hundred and forty years, one of the longest runs of any dynasty in Europe.
The Ottoman sieges
Vienna was besieged twice. In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent arrived late in the season with his heavy artillery bogged down behind him, and withdrew after three weeks. In 1683 a much larger army under Kara Mustafa besieged the city for two months, and was broken by a relief force under Jan Sobieski of Poland charging down from the Kahlenberg — the largest cavalry charge in history to that point. The Ottoman advance into central Europe ended there.
The Baroque city was built on the confidence that followed, and on the wealth of the reconquest.
The long nineteenth century
The Congress of Vienna redrew Europe in 1814–15 and gave the city a reputation for dancing that it has monetised ever since. The 1848 revolution failed. In 1857 Franz Joseph ordered the walls demolished and the Ringstrasse built.
The last decades before 1914 produced an astonishing concentration of work: Freud, Klimt, Schiele, Mahler, Schoenberg, Loos, Wittgenstein, Otto Wagner. It happened in a city that was also producing modern political antisemitism under Mayor Karl Lueger, and the two are not separable.
1918 to 1945
The empire dissolved in 1918. Red Vienna ran from 1919 until the civil war of February 1934, when the government shelled the workers’ housing blocks. Dollfuss’s clerical dictatorship followed, and he was murdered by Nazis five months later.
In March 1938 German troops entered Austria to public celebration and Hitler addressed a crowd of some 200,000 on Heldenplatz. Vienna’s Jewish population, around 180,000, was expelled, robbed and murdered; some 65,000 Austrian Jews died in the Holocaust. The city was bombed heavily from 1944 and fought over in April 1945.
Occupation and after
Vienna was divided into four sectors by the Allies, with the first district under joint four-power control — the world of The Third Man, which was filmed here in 1948 in the ruins and the sewers. The occupation lasted ten years. The State Treaty of May 1955 restored full sovereignty on condition of permanent neutrality, and the last soldier left that October.
Neutrality made Vienna useful: it became a UN headquarters city in 1979, hosted the OPEC secretariat and the IAEA, and served as a meeting ground between the blocs. Austria joined the EU in 1995.